Odessa

She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and two Loft-McKnight awards. Kirkpatrick lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

My thanks especially to Daniel Slager and
Allison Wigen at Milkweed Editions, and to Peter Campion.

Lindquist & Vennum. I am honored
to be the first recipient of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry

“Altered Self: Medical Directive,” is so titled after Antonio Damasio’s
dicussion of consciousness in The Feeling of What Happens.

“ Sensory Ghosts: Patient History,” comes from the term originally
used by the nineteenth-century neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell to
describe the sensations, often painful, experienced by patients after
losing a limb. Mitchell wrote that such patients carry “a constant or
inconstant phantom of the missing member, a sensory ghost ...
sometimes a most inconvenient presence, faintly felt at the time,
but ready to be called up to his perception by a blow, a touch, or a
change of wind,” ( Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences, 1872).
More recently, doctors have referred to this phenomenon as a
“phantom limb.”

In “Brain Tumor,” the title “A Woman Perpetually Falling:
Symptoms, Tests, Diagnosis,” quotes from Norman Doidge in The
Brain That Changes Itself.

Still I think of Keats
dying alone in Rome, saying to Dr. Severn at the end,

All my life what wasn’t enough
is suddenly what I want.

When I woke up I was dreaming.
When I woke up I was dreaming.
Time gone was present again.

Little dreams, little lies, little time.

Where are the people now?