PRAISE FOR BED OF IMPATIENS:
Has American poetry ever produced a fresher, savvier, grittier, more elegant, and drop-dead formally exhilarating sequence than Katie Hartsockâs âHotels, Motels, and Extended Staysâ? If so, Iâve yet to see it. Hartsock is as deft (and loving) with the vulgarities of truck stop rent-by-the-hour as with the secret wit of rhyme, or the venerables of Homeric epic: her range and her inventiveness appear to know no limit. And this is just a fraction of what bursts to life in Bed of Impatiens. Iâm dazzled by the sheer bounty of it.
-Linda Gregerson
Like RenÊ Magritte I want to paint âThis is not a first bookâ under this first book. It is Lolita all grown up and taking us on a cross-country tour of the motels she stayed in with Humbert. Itâs St. Augustine as Dennis Rodman, elbowing us out of position underneath Godâs basket. But itâs not a cacophony of surrealism. Ms. Hartsockâs classical training-her knowledge and powerful rhythms-is the ground, the spine of this book (pun intended); but the excitement is watching the ancient and the contemporary meet in an explosion of true Form.
-James Cummins
Katie Hartsockâs Bed of Impatiens characteristic vantage includes landscapes derelict and macabre, like the flooded grave in the first poem, and the endless highways of the US, with their extended-stay motels and the ghosts that inhabit them. Hartsock is a sharp and clever reader of the books of nature and of art, yet writes in nobodyâs shadow.
-Mary Kinzie
What truth to find in a world whose rivers âwe cannot swim in and no/ cannot drink the water/ cannot imagine that,â a land of âseedless sweetnessâ and dank motels that are its monuments to transience? Katie Hartsockâs answer in her ambitious first collection, Bed of Impatiens, is to wander and âlet the weather in,â to keep recalibrating her position in an ever-shifting poetic landscape.
-Lee Sharkey
Katie Hartsock is attracted to âbeauty in otherwise unlovely place.â An often amused and goodhearted spirit sets the tone of some of Hartsockâs poems, but the long historical and literary view of this poet also encompasses the tragic. Open to encounter, memory, feeling, avid for them, eloquent about them, these poems.
-Reginald Gibbons (from the foreword)
 Katie Hartsock was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and has lived in Cincinnati, Ann Arbor, and Chicago. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University. Recipient of the 2015 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets, she is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Hotels, Motels, and Extended Stays and Veritas Caput. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, Southwest Review, RHINO, Measure, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Midwestern Gothic, among other journals, and in the anthology Down to the Dark River: Poems about the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press, 2015). She is an assistant professor of English at Oakland University (MI).