The title Little Pharma is both a doppelgänger and a cri de coeur: as the poet’s dreamlike double, the character Little Pharma navigates the murky channels of the hospital and clinic, the borderlands of the living and the dead, and the journey from novice to healer. At the same time, the poems plead for a return to a littler pharma, a space for stolen intimacy and momentary quiet amid the impersonal and engulfing chill that floods the anatomical theater and the corridors of illness. Little Pharma is a Dantean journey from the depths of an institution, and of a pervading personal dread, to a renewed celebration of human contact, the body, and the giddy, terrifying excitement of ongoing life.
Excerpt from “Intensive Care”
Doctor, I don my day-face
like a net of cathodes, drained
of all irruption, non-particular.
Whose mask and sign
is Sun. Enter this sickroom
bugged with surging pentecosts of light,
the green tracings
of the representative heart.
Permit now its miraculous whim.
Combining the urgent immediacy of a live performance with the close-up scrutiny of the microscope, the poems in Laura Kolbe’s dazzling Little Pharma expose the façade of false economies (pharmaceutical, medical, societal, artistic, sexual) by trafficking instead—with wit, candor, and enviable savvy—in the currency of vulnerability.
Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Orexia and Vanitas, Rough
The speakers of this searching work erode the sham certainties of institutional logic to accommodate ghosts. Laura Kolbe writes a scintillating metaphysical poetry lit by ‘the anatomist’s awe of layers’ through dazzling strata of perception. Her imagination is a fuller form of attention, a means of seeing not only what is but what what is implies, reflects, calls forth through sensuous correspondence.
Margaret Ross, author of A Timeshare
Latest happenings:
November 2022 - “Two Forms of Truth,” an interview and photo spread in Weill Cornell Medical College’s Impact magazine.
A reading at the James Merrill House, in conversation with fiction writer and physician Anna DeForest.
A playlist for Little Pharma is up on the Largehearted Boy website!
Little Pharma was featured on the podcast The Nocturnists and on the public radio program With Good Reason.
“Buried Abecedary for Intensive Care” was selected by Matthew Zapruder for Best American Poetry 2022.
Little Pharma was named among Commonweal’s best books of 2021 in Anthony Domestico’s short, lovely review.
Little Pharma was named among the Best Books of 2021 by the Boston Globe, with a brief commentary by Christopher Spaide.
“Buried Abecedary for Intensive Care” in the New York Times Magazine, with generous commentary by Reginald Dwayne Betts.
Little Pharma reviewed by David Woo for Poetry Foundation.
I talk with Lauren Korn about Little Pharma on Montana Public Radio’s The Write Question here.
An interview, audio clip, and some Whitman rewrites at Brooklyn Poets.