Kathryn Rantala, poet and visual artist, is at home with the ineffable.
Writing
Kathryn Rantala is the author of several books, most recently, from Sandy Press, My Archipelago, a finalist for the 2024 Big Other Award for Poetry, and A Little Family, from Spuyten Duyvil Press. [See the Books section.] She recently collaborated with artist Jack Gunter on a three-volume boxed set of books published in 2024, and has completed a collection, Quarried Light, that invokes saints and martyrs for a secular look at a well-lived life—that book, illustrated with oil paintings by artist George Farrah, is expected to appear in late 2025.
She has published widely in journals and the small press with such as Big Other, Utriculi, Upstairs at Duroc, The Denver Quarterly, Field, Iowa Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poetry Salzburg, elimae, Third Bed and others. Her work is upcoming at Ron Slate's journal On The Seawall and in AI and Feminism, an anthology from Louffa Press.
Visual Art
Kathryn uses what she finds in thrifts and the world to create what she calls “stills”, three dimensional poses, assemblages of arrested action such as you might see if you stopped a motion picture film mid-viewing—in this case, imaginary films. This visual art seems to her to be another version of her poetry. She has recently augmented that visual work with two dimensional enhanced photographs of composed objects, usually as a series in furtherance of a theme or text, which she calls "iterations."
Her stills have been shown privately and publicly for the last decade, as recently as 2025, and reside in several private collections as well as in in a series of art books. See Portfolio Images under the menu link Visual Art: The Object as Poem; under Projects, The Exhibitionist; and under Books, The Orphans of Thor Street.
Projects
This section presents selected published and unpublished pieces.
Contact
Kathryn lives in Edmonds, Washington and may be reached at editor@ravennapress.com.