On Kathy Nilsson

Kathy Nilsson's work is strangely stern—beautiful without being pleasant, compassionate but not at all sappy, sometimes funny but more often wry. It was my privilege to have her as a student in the Bennington M.F.A. program for the term that she was polishing and assembling her manuscript, and I had the experience, in poem after poem, of the smack of fresh air, what Marianne Moore called "gusto," and also of infinite tenderness. She is word-drunk; ferociously precise; a jealous guardian of the privileges of the errant imagination, the illogical but intuitive leap.

—April Bernard, author of three collections of poetry, most recently Swan Electric, as well as a novel. She teaches at Bennington College.