Brooklyn author releases poetry collection
Brooklyn BookBeat
Kate Farrell, a Brooklyn-based writer, has recently released a poetry collection titled “Visiting Night at the Academy of Longing.” The book treats readers to a metaphysical trek through “the cosmos behind the forehead.”
The itinerary reprises Farrell’s childhood plan to run away with her sister to an elusive blue forest — and spans a visit to an island where bodies are optional, an afterlife reading where T. S. Eliot recites his revised “Four Quartets” and a scheme to “catch and train/the birds to catch and train us.”
In the wake of her young husband’s suicide, Farrell wonders whether Keats’ “truth of imagination” can tell her children why life is worth living. Her poetry would seem a force in that direction. Indeed, her “yen to get at the otherworldly” yields a collection that almost amounts to a “unified theory of love, death and poetry,” while swapping “old/North stars for new” and remaining “faithful [in Dickinson’s dictum] to mystery.”
All in all, the dream-like “academy” of the title could stand for the book itself, its curriculum of loss and longing, a lens for our own.