Whether she is memorializing a misunderstood planet, imagining a propulsive jig with a 5,000 year old statue or lovingly describing the urban landscape, “the giant necklace of red taillights,” from her cab window, Farrar’s journey of the familiar and the unfamiliar is alive with her conversational tone and provocative imagination. At once tender and feisty, the poems in The Brief Clear transcend their own circumstances of loss and love, inviting us to see our own with both pathos and humor. Don’t miss this beautiful ride.
— Kathleen Kraft, author of Fairview Road
The Brief Clear, Finishing Line Press; Georgetown, Kentucky, 2015
Both sharp and tender, Kim Farrar’s deftly written poems in The Brief Clear move between love and loss, difficulties and confidence, and from keenly observed delineations of nature to stark city life encounters.
Leah Maines, Publisher, Finishing Line Press
The Familiar, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky, 2011
Kim Farrar writes: “I like the polar caps/that hold the cracked/egg of earth,” an image which contains so much of what she loves, needs, despairs of losing, does lose, then regains again through the bringing into existence of these poems. The work of her poems is first of all to honor loss and the grief which accompanies it. But something else happens as a result of this: the reader begins to see the fierce love that is at the heart of this grief. “Changing the foreign/back into the familiar,” is indeed the work of this book: and a beautiful work it is.
Jim Moore
The Impossible Physics of The Hummingbird, Unsolicited Press, 2025
The Impossible Physics of the Hummingbird delves into how the impossible happens every day. The hummingbird should not be able to fly—its body too heavy for its slight wings— and yet it does. We should not be able to love, laugh, and find joy in the face of so much grief, labor, disability, and hardship—and yet we do.
Cover Art Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement to Sarah Young for her beautiful photograph used on the cover of The Familiar.
Grateful acknowledgement to the wonderful artist, Julia M. Becker, who created the cover art used for The Brief Clear.