Inspecting Nostalgia

"'Could such beauty go unremarked?' the book first wonders. Sensitive and meditative, the poems attend precisely to that which often goes unnoticed: the vulnerable, the intimate, the quiet. R. Kolewe rummages texts, memories, the discarded, the leftover, reminding that we must keep paying attention to the particular - 'the real word scar' - that we must keep examining the past in order to understand the present."
--Oana Avasilichioaei
"A complicated nostalgia, 'want being what isn't now, ' or maybe wasn't then, animates the fragmented lyrics of R. Kolewe's Inspecting Nostalgia. The past loops uncertain; if becomes again, times another version. As Kolewe inspects interstices of knowing, imagining, and forgeting, shards of memory glint in the gaps: 'Sunshine on cedar. Stairs. Books. Almost noon.' Precise and ruminative, Inspecting Nostalgiaturns yearning to wonder."
--Natalie Simpson
"These poems are akin to an interior portraiture of still-lives. Kolewe enacts a curious, seemingly imperceptible talent for rendering nostalgia party to a mode of true grace, not the flatly sentimental, but instead this work invokes the cool gravity of viewing one's self-but-not seated alone in a quiet room, seemingly suspended forever in a discrete moment of space-time. 'Careless desolation simply. / I should turn back to tell it right / repeating and not repeating astonishment.' Inspecting Nostalgia offers us both the terrible beauty and delicate suffering of the material/immaterial's double bind all the while deftly echoing that longing for that impossible, par excellence you."
--Liz Howard
"With wild precision, Kolewe traces the dissolving rhythm of ephemerality to write of the ghostly past whose vanishing persists into the present - 'No need to look back to lose you.' Inspecting Nostalgia inhabits the intersecting temporalities that accrue within and around a life - those jostling times of the body, of memory, of history, of the stars - to create poems that startlingly discern the mind's intricate, minimally perceptible movements as it falls into and out of time."
--Julie Joosten