Longwood Author Series: little pharma In-Person
The title Little Pharma is both a doppelgänger and a cri de coeur: as the poet’s dreamlike double, the character Little Pharma navigates the murky channels of the hospital and clinic, the borderlands of the living and the dead, and the journey from novice to healer. At the same time, the poems plead for a return to a littler pharma, a space for stolen intimacy and momentary quiet amid the impersonal and engulfing chill that floods the anatomical theater and the corridors of illness. Little Pharma is a Dantean journey from the depths of an institution, and of a pervading personal dread, to a renewed celebration of human contact, the body, and the giddy, terrifying excitement of ongoing life.
In Laura Kolbe’s deft hands, a poem becomes a tool for peering closely into what is often concealed. Her poems are vivid explosions of language, thought, and wit, and to read her poems is to encounter a voice seeking to see and name the world accurately—and in so doing understand our condition. An extraordinary first collection. --Meghan O'Rourke, author of Sun In Days and The Long Goodbye
