Love in the Key of COBRA
Iron Horse Literary Review, 2025
“In Love in the Key of Cobra, Katie Kemple’s speaker moves through a landscape of out-of-network prescriptions, dead-end job searches, and thrift store reveries, all in pursuit of the ever-elusive promise of stability. Set against the backdrop of the gig economy and a volatile job market, these poems pulse with the rhythm of daily survival—where she is “in transit to the next office, / next task, next layoff, next paycheck, / next co-pay, next Zoom, next cold call.” Amid the instability, Kemple finds moments of unexpected beauty and quiet resilience—through love, shared struggles, and a persistent hope for something better on the horizon. Her voice navigates the peaks and valleys with grace, each poem resonating with emotional precision and hard-won insight. I won't forget it. ” —Tracey Knapp, author Mouth
“‘What's beneath the accumulation?” Kemple asks, staring down the void: the collapse of the middle class. Katie Kemple’s COBRA’s lyrics brilliantly knife through layoffs, job hunts, and the emotional weight of economic disparities and bureaucratic and corporate fuckery. “My resume reads like a doer not an achiever. /How to square that when achievement /tastes like luck” But despite the struggle and sadness, or perhaps because of the struggle and sadness love accomplishes its best work, and Kemple reminds that joy must be had, under the worst of circumstances; that joy cuts close to the bone at the hardest of times. COBRA’s timely lyrics are lush, sensual and double-edged.”—Cassandra Whitaker, NBCC author of A Wolf Devouring A Wolf Devouring A Wolf
Big Man
Chestnut Review Chapbooks, 2025
"These poems sing of the everyday world, the everydayness of life, love, and family, lifting us via the poet’s act of attention into an almost spiritual realm." —Christopher Citro, author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun
"Big Man guides us through an unflinching portrait of a father. But perhaps, more importantly, we witness a journey from father as mythic figure to father as human." —Su Cho author of The Symmetry of Fish
“Kemple beautifully blurs the lines between poetic verse and biography as she documents the life of her father through the eyes of a daughter as witness.”—Karla Cordero, author of How To Pull Apart The Earth
"Swift—& blunt w/ grief: 'We opened the earth's / lid and buried him there.' Katie Kemple's twenty-five poem ode to her dad, Big Man, is personal, specific, vivid." —Adam Golaski, author of Voice Notes
"Reading Katie Kemple's Big Man feels like sitting with an old friend on a comfy couch and exchanging stories about parents late into the night." —Katie Manning, author of Hereverent and 28,065 Nights