About the Author

Courtney Kampa's writing has been widely published, appearing in Boston Review, TriQuarterly, the Journal, the National Poetry Review, New England Review, and elsewhere, and she has received awards from Best New Poets, the Atlantic, Poets & Writers magazine, and North American Review. In 2014, she won the Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, as well as Columbia University's David Craig Austin Memorial Award for Most Outstanding Thesis. She was raised in Virginia.

Reviews

"If the title of Courtney Kampa's debut collection begs the question 'why?, ' her opening poem, 'Cardiac, ' offers one answer: 'Heart with its headache. With its own set of vowels, / its ratifying pulse: because, because because.' And if the supporting leg--to borrow a dance term for these poems of gracious, balletic force--is girlhood (vulnerable, tensile, mythic, wary, trusting), the working leg is whatever act of blessing or forgiveness is fueled by the wounded, broken, resilient, bloodloaded nave of the heart. Wielding breath-taking lyricism and bro-nacular with equal savvy, Kampa's fearless poems course with a ruthless, talismanic tenderness that is rare and necessary. They 'introduce us to ourselves.'"--Lisa Russ Spaar (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)

"Laden, unsparing, and luminous, the poems in Courtney Kampa's Our Lady of Not Asking Why are acts of faith in language's capacity to articulate the most fundamental, and crucial, human truths. Even when faced with 'something we haven't words for, ' which is not infrequently the case, Kampa's poetry--with its layers of hypotaxis, metaphor, metanoia, and paradox ('It wants to want / for nothing, which it does, but also wants / a purpose, which it has already')--rises to the occasion by diving down into it, making the reach for the everyday ineffable (mysteries of the heart, of the past; the inner lives of others) as graceful, and gorgeous, as it is inseparable from leading a fully human life. 'There are loaves and fishes / inside us, ' she writes. 'There are whole vineyards / we'll never see.' Our Lady of Not Asking Why is a testament to the poet's refusal not to try to see them anyway--and to the way she somehow, through the effort, lays what's inside us bare."--Timothy Donnelly (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)