About the Author

Rebecca Kokitus is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Seasonal Affected (APEP Publications, 2019), Blue Bucolic (Thirty West Publishing, 2019), and Velvet Offering (APEP Publications, 2019). She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, and her poetry and prose has been published in numerous journals. She is originally from the Pennsylvania coal region and currently resides in the Philadelphia area.

Author Photo by Abigal Kokitus

Reviews

“Blue Bucolic is a pilgrimage through memory, where the Anthropocene is both feared and revered in equal measure, where the past is confronted in the present amid the coal-country landscape of rural Pennsylvania, where ‘tired, strung out towns, wrung out like / gray dishcloths and hung to dry’ are a ceaseless reminder of the fragility of a life subject to time and trauma. Autumn leaves fall like burnt pages torn from their hymnals as the self, home, and history are brought to grade within the heart of this work: ‘that smell of rot I burrow into / like the knotted muscles of / my childhood bed.’ Kokitus presents us with a collection of poetry which is not to be read, but to be lived inside like a body, like a small town, for years, and never forgotten.”

—ANGELO COLAVITA, author of Flowersonnets

“Blue Bucolic is an impressive and raw collection. The tone of melancholy and nostalgia gives the reader a definite sense of place—a dissolving and rusted-out town that sticks to your ribs. The collection is dark and moody and exciting all at once, a true testament to Kokitus’s expertise in crafting dense and heart-wringing imagery through bare, striking language.”

—MADELINE ANTHES, author of Beautiful, Violent Things and assistant editor of Lost Balloon