Full-length poetry collection, Gasher Press, September 2023
At the intersections of eco-poetics and queer family-building, Ardor moves across the political and natural landscapes of Alaska, Colorado, and the deep American South. These poems meditate on love and motherhood in the context of environmental crisis, foregrounding the domestic in a quest to continually re-imagine a hopeful future.
"'I was supposed to be wiser,' Alyse Knorr writes in Ardor, her capacious meditation on lesbian love, marriage, motherhood, domesticity, and vocation. Who hasn't felt the same? In this collection, brimming with deftly rendered landscapes, deep reckoning with our zeitgeist, and rich, literary allusions, Knorr's wisdom is continuously revealed through her speaker's questions. This speaker asks, 'What am I minding but stillness? What have I grown except loss?' She asks, 'When did we last surprise each other, in this yard or any other?' She asks, 'What gained and what risked by changing the terms?' And when she asks, "What delights will transfigure you today?," I answer, This book. It seems impossible to read Ardor any way but ardently."
--Julie Marie Wade, author of When I Was Straight and Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing
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Full-length poetry collection, Green Mountains Review Poetry Prize, selected by Olena Kalytiak Davis 2016
In 1405, Christine de Pizan, the world's first professional writer, published an allegorical work called The Book of the City of Ladies, in which she imagined constructing (with the help of her fairy godmothers Reason, Rectitude, and Justice) a walled city where women could live safe from sexism, misogyny, and gendered violence. Six hundred years later, we still need such a city. Mega-City Redux charts a road-trip search for this mythical city today, with the help of 21st-century feminist heroes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess, and Dana Scully from The X-Files.
" 'You gals look like you know how to party.' Pop open a PBR or order a Sex on the Beach and let Alyse Knorr guide you on a journey with Xena, Scully, and Buffy to a world 'as safe as it ever will be' from trauma and hopeless love in the age of screens. Mega-City Redux is essential architecture built from 'sword, suit, stake, and pen'--feminine, marvelous, and mega-tough."
--Mel Nichols, author of Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon
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Full-length poetry collection, Switchback Books 2016
"Through a startling mixture of forms and language, Copper Mother generates an unusual love story—of loving one’s world so tremendously that that world must be shared, at enormous risk and with unprecedented ingenuity and effort. The 'Friends' of Knorr’s universe bring their gentle curiosity to human heroics and frailties, and the humans—we humans—are redeemed by our eagerness to share our naked selves and by Jane, who bravely matches the terrors of mortality with a selfless faith in our capacity to love. Sincere even in its playful and fantastic moments, Knorr’s poetics emerges from a deep groove of mourning all that we have to lose and will certainly lose, every day and on the last day, perhaps most of all 'our mothers, tired/and lovely and floral and gone.' In that mourning, though, runs an illimitable current of open-hearted reverence that is the best of humanity and beyond its possession—that craving for contact '[t]his world wishes across/space' to whomever might accept our greeting and the belief that we are already together with loved ones, those we’ve lost and those we haven’t yet met, in the slippery fullness of time."
-Elizabeth Savage, author of Idylliad
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Full-length poetry collection, Furniture Press Books 2013
"Inside every intimate relationship, Alyse Knorr argues, lies a land of the imagination known only to those in relation. Her beautiful and wise Annotated Glass follows its protagonist, Alice, into and out of lands invented in childhood and adolescence, between family members and lovers, uncovering in each situation and between each of its characters “a network of nerves speaking each to each.” The beauty of Knorr’s writing lives in these electric connections, the way Alice’s desire for her lover Jenny runs—a “current on my tongue like the inside/of a star.” But the wisdom of Annotated Glass lies in its ability to describe the loss not only of family and lovers but also the imaginative landscapes that remain behind when they do. Knorr captures each elegiac departure with images of startling clarity and ambient texture: “ yellow tractors mowing/fields of sunflowers whose faces/have turned black.” This is a first book of rare real power and insight."
--Brian Teare, author of Companion Grasses
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