Consider these few notes my handing The Porcupine of Mind off to you — you read it, you write about it, then we’ll come back and talk.

The Porcupine of Mind by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer. Broadstone Books, 103 pages, $14.50.

By Jim Kates

You read the poetry of a friend differently from the way you read the poetry of a stranger. And if you make the acquaintance of a person’s poetry about the same time as you make the acquaintance of the person, the two get intertwined in odd ways—similar to the odd ways in which earnest student-readers want to read poetry. (“Where did that poem come from?” they ask, as if autobiography makes literature. As if they wanted to get to know your family along with your writing.)

And friends aren’t supposed to review friends. This is a line that gets fuzzy and gets crossed more often than not. It always has been thus, not always comfortably, ever since Cain killed his brother Abel. A little less than kin or more than kind. We tend to read our friends politely, because they ask us to, and are caught off guard sometimes when we like what we read better than we had expected.

These musings are by way of preface to some comments I want to make about a new book of poems by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, The Porcupine of Mind. Katerina has become a friend of mine; I have recently been a guest in her house; I have received sustenance at her hand. Her dynamic, home-based publishing company (Accents Publishing) has published a chapbook of mine. All of which should make me wary when she hands me a book and says, “I’d like you to read this.” I want to make sure I’m at least courteous. And it should make you wary when I discover delights inside the book that make me want to write about it myself—or, at least, use it as an excuse for writing about books I should be handing off for someone else to write about.

So, yeah, consider these few notes my handing the book off to you—you read it, you write about it, then we’ll come back and talk.

Meanwhile, let me tell you a little bit about The Porcupine of Mind. The poems have all the barb of quills and the barbarity of half-foreignness, and I think I like Katerina’s (yes, I’ll keep calling her by her first name, just to remind you) work best when she’s most lapidary, as here:

I pictured you younger,
I told the word naïve.
I pictured you happier,
she answered.

The poet engages the word naïve because she is an immigrant to English, from Bulgarian, in which she also writes poems. Another reason for distrust—the whole second language thing. A distrust the poems themselves quickly engage and dispel, as in “Mother and Son Immigrants”:

He cries, Mom, I have a boo boo.
She asks, What’s a boo boo?

(It is no accident that Katerina’s publishing endeavors include the 2011 anthology Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems. )

Katerina can write longer. Read how she exploits a destabilization of verb tenses in “The Kiss of the Stone,” which

is slow
and significant.

Set in his ways, he knows
how he wants you
to turn your face, how much
breath to apply on his
deliberate tongue.

While your lips are locked,
you meet his gaze and see that he
already waits for you at this same spot
in at least three centuries.

That’s when your next kiss
will be. That’s when he’ll admit
he’s never stopped loving you.

He will ask your dust to marry him
back then.

Poet Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

For those of you who read Bulgarian, some of these poems are available in that language in another 2011 book, Nedelimo chislo (Invisible Number) and Katerina has an earlier bilingual book, The Air Around the Butterfly. I hesitate to refer to either version of any one poem as a translation of the other. They are rather manifestations of the poet’s straddling linguistic resources. She rides the wild horses of her two cultures, as seen in what may be the most moving of the poems in The Porcupine of Mind, “Better,” wherein she confesses,

The time I left
my best friend behind,

there were parts of me
I left her. I left.

So, dear reader, let’s not call this a review. It’s more of an introduction. You and I have bumped into each other at that great cocktail party called literature, and I want to pull you into something more than small talk with my new friend Katerina Stoykova-Klemer. The Porcupine of Mind. Enjoy.