Tanka & Me

“As with the best writing, I found myself simultaneously devastated and soothed, satiated and hungry for more.”

--Susanna Childress, author of Entering the House of Awe 


TANKA & ME is a visceral, pleading, and fierce collection of poems, underpinned with thudding vessels and satisfying wreckage. Kaethe Schwehn externalizes the overlooked power of women into a multidimensional character who hunts both the speaker and the reader. Our wild Tanka engages down deep with role-play, sex, prayer, and refusal until we can’t look away or stay quiet. These are love poems, but they love with claws and whiskey, bolt cutters and saws. You can love someone for a long time without knowing how, our speaker realizes, and Tanka prowls and preens and breaks us down until we know how to love ourselves, how to know ourselves, how to free ourselves. TANKA & ME is feminist poetry with muscle, bones, and heart.


“Meet Tanka, the girlish/ghoulish spirit at the heart of Kaethe Schwehn’s marvelous Tanka and Me. She’s ‘all ears and a liver,’' knows extraordinary things, has a boyfriend named Briar and poignant adventures in grief, but her penchant for detail, at once hilarious and harrowing, is all Kaethe Schwehn.”

--Leslie Adrienne Miller, author of Y