Kathryn Rantala, poet and visual artist, is at home with the ineffable.
Writing
Kathryn Rantala is the author of several books, most recently, Malformations of the Human Heart, a poetic biography of John and Anne Hunter, following, from Sandy Press, Translated from the English, and My Archipelago, a finalist for the 2024 Big Other Award for Poetry. A Little Family, from Spuyten Duyvil Press, appeared in 2023. [See the Books section.] She collaborated with artist Jack Gunter on a three-volume boxed set of books published in 2024, and her collection, TWO, which combines two books, Quarried Light and The Pauper Statues, that invoke saints and martyrs and wooden Finnish carvings of alms-takers for a secular look at a well-lived life, is due from Spuyten Duyvil Press in 2026. A special limited edition of Quarried Light, illustrated with oil paintings by artist George Farrah, is planned.
She has published widely in journals and the small press with such as Ron Slates' On the Seawall, 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 as a chapbook, Letters to America, from Louffa Press.
Her books have received positive endorsements by Daniel Borzutsky, Karen An-Hwei Lee, Gordon Lish, Norman Lock, George Myers, Jr., Brian Evenson, Dawn Raffel, Angela Woodward, James McKean, Tsipi Keller, Robert McNamara, plus such comments as . . . "one of the most interesting writers today" . . . "her daring astonishes" . . . "full of sentences that I wish were mine" . . . "the lines never fail to sing" . . . "I feel a movement of air—even as the words themselves stand firm" . . . "the music of these poems" . . . "complex images, frozen in time, deep, beautiful, poetic" . . . "beautifully achieved!"
Visual Art
Kathryn uses what she finds in thrifts and the world to create what she sometimes 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.