Kathryn Rantala, a poet and visual artist, is at home with the ineffable.
Writing
Kathryn Rantala is the author of several books, most recently My Archipelago, from Sandy Press, 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, this book illustrated with oil paintings by artist George Farrah, that is expected to appear in late 2025.
She has published widely in journals and the small press with such as Big Other, Utriculi, The Denver Quarterly, Field, Iowa Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and others. Her work is upcoming at Ron Slate's journal The Seawall in 2025.
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 suddenly 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 in furtherance of a theme, 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 under Visual Art: The Object as Poem; under Projects: The Exhibitionist; and under Books: The Orphans of Thor Street.
Projects
IN this section Projects are miscellaneous, uncollected writing pieces.
Contact
Kathryn lives in Edmonds, Washington and may be reached at editor@ravennapress.com.