ISSUE 51 

KCAI Exhibition #1 // Curated by Jordan Stempleman

"I invested in my stable life" is a poem that could most accurately be described as me narrating my own experience of moving between earthly life and its attendant duties and a world inside of me experienced as an elevated, expansive form of magic – the negotiation concludes with a rejection of this binary (mundane vs. divine) and an admission that the earthly may be an access point to the marvelous. This crisis of living in the real world is also central to the crisis of Madame Bovary, a novel I have read and reread several times at different points in my life and which is present in this poem. I recited this poem in a nondescript field hoping to mimic where a cow or other barn-based animal would live and possibly give birth. The poem is set in a very real place in rural Missouri – I once was a nanny on a farm on Sassafras Lane.

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Bridget Lowe is the author of two collections of poetry, My Second Work and At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky. She received the 92Y Discovery / The Nation prize in 2009 and her work has since appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, and the Best American Poetry anthology. Poet and literary critic James Longenbach wrote about her most recent collection, 'No poet writing today is more direct than Bridget Lowe: at the same time, no poet is more uncanny, more seductively strange. These poems love the world that does not always love them back. They're brilliant, scary, and heartbreakingly alive.' A recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, she lives in Kansas City in the neighborhood where she was born.