The Next Infinity - Poems by Nancy Botkin

Publication Date: December 15, 2019
Paperback, 88 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-60-1

Available from Small Press Distribution

There is something wondrously imponderable about the title of Nancy Botkin’s latest poetry collection: the next infinity. What would that be like, the something that comes after everything? After negotiating one’s way through religion, through the legacy and loss of parents, through a past receding “small and dim” as the memories of scratchy songs on a AM car radio, through moments fleeting like “ice cream melting faster than we could eat it.”

These poems offer some intimations, but only after beginning with a couple of deceptively lighthearted meditations on the slipperiness of language, “skin” replacing “spin” (as in “the bottle”), and “right angels” slipping past the spellchecker to turn geometry into theology. “There are layers and layers / in misspellings,” Botkin observes, as there are in life, and much of this collection proceeds through the peeling away of such layers. Such as:

“An autopsy of infinity would uncover a bare, stripped down field.” That’s a pretty austere outlook, and it pervades many of the poems here.

We all have bodies, so someone gets the camera:
the family in front of the new car.

Someone has to pack all of it into that tiny frame.

Such a compelling image: the fact of our having bodies almost incidental, an occasion to mark like a new car, so much crowded into a fleeting instant.

At another point she observes, “I’m starting to wonder if I’m in this poem / all by myself.” A bit later, in the same poem, she asks “if we are keepers of our own asylum.” By unpacking the experience of radical isolation in such unflinching terms, Botkins reveals how we are each our own infinity. And because we share this, we are not so alone after all.

It’s a lot to think about, and at times she acts as if she’d rather not:

My brain is even less inviting
when it’s wild with dark birds flitting
through its spangled hallways.

Perhaps less inviting to Botkin, but it is a blessing to her readers who join with those birds flitting through the hallway of her rich imagination.

The final image of the book is a cosmic parlor trick, and perhaps that is all life is. And if so, these poems assure us, that’s enough.

Praise for Nancy Botkin & The Next Infinity

“If I could just see the inside of my head. // If I could harvest the mind’s flutter,” muses Nancy Botkin in her stunning new collection, The Next Infinity. These remarkable poems explore the speaker’s early religious life, loss of her mother, and challenges of what it means to be more present and awake. But they don’t wallow; as she writes, “I say this life is hard, but we can’t set up a trading post for grief.” These poems transform loss and regret into generative vision, casting them as only part of what it means to become more fully human. Botkin knows “You can’t stop the whirring, the endless circles,” that “That’s the difficulty of this Earth” yet is wise enough to seek redemption in the human capacity to speak the toughening truths of the tongue: “Beautiful telescoping of a tongue / where innumerable stars wink / along the untamed ocean of flesh. // Impossible to avoid all the broken glass / hidden in the sand, but carry on dancing. // Carry on fumbling in the dark.” And carry on she does, bringing us with her. This is one of the most genuine, engaging collections I have read in some time. With imagistic brilliance and stirring associative leaps, Nancy Botkin maps for us possibilities of living more wholly in the ever-widening moment of “the next infinity.”

—George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016)

These poems brilliantly capture the joys, quotidian miseries, and terrors of living in human bodies and minds in the swirling midst of every kind of hunger, of mortality and infinity. Sensual, funny, witty, Botkin delights and surprises on every page. I want to spend more time with this poet capable of such alchemy, “an autopsy of infinity” and “the rain fell like feathers/on the silver casket.” When I step into the abyss, I want these poems to hold my hand.

—April Ossmann, author of Event Boundaries

Born in Detroit, Nancy Botkin earned a BA in English from Michigan State University and a Master of Liberal Studies from Indiana University South Bend. Her first full-length poetry collection, Parts That Were Once Whole (2007), included “Poem With Light and Dark,” which won the Maize First Place Poetry Prize sponsored by the Writers’ Center of Indiana. Her poetry has been published in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's column, “American Life in Poetry.” Botkin’s work has been published in various journals such as Poetry, Poetry East, the Laurel Review, and the American Literary Review. She is currently a senior lecturer in the English department at Indiana University South Bend, where she has been teaching since 1991. She will soon retire from teaching to devote more time to poetry, art, travel, and her grandson.