Distance and Direction
Reviews

"Thirty-two essays on the subjects of time and place-some somewhat discursive, others lyrical, all as brief as a sigh. Kitchen is interested in the past, particularly in how the present conveys us there. These lovely pieces flow like reveries (as, indeed, quite a few of them are) and reveal in virtually every case Kitchen's capacious heart. Like thoughts, the essays do no always end where they began and often establish surprising connections and uncover buried treasure. She's fond of brief images-e.g., 'The food is vintage 1955. Campbell's soup. Hot cheese. My grandmother's sturdy black shoes. Her apron.' Readers must connect the dots and, having done so, find themselves in possession of a photograph of an era. She loves, as well, the paradox: she describes herons that have a purpose in their purposelessness; things unsaid are nonetheless articulated. As she states in her preface, some of the pieces are experiments. She plays with viewpoint-uses the first person to achieve immediacy, the second to draw us in, the third to step back, most effectively in the segment that deals with the death of her father. 'She never saw his body,' write Kitchen of herself and her father. Scattered throughout, as well, are six brief segments with colors for titles. She begins with blue, moves to black (appropriately, in the section immediately after her father's death), and ends with red. Some of these are wonderful-poems hid[ing] in paragraphs . . . A number of landscapes appear throughout: the Pacific Northwest (featuring a dead-on description of the eastbound Columbia River Highway as it leaves the river's demesne), Brazil (which she visited in 1971), Ireland. She reveals failings (she cannot paint, and when she dances, 'The body gets in the way') and describes painful moments (working with survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing). 'Some books are better than others,' she declares. This is one of the former."-Kirkus Reviews

"The voice in these prose essays is window-pane clear, but with the power of sun through a magnifying glass. Kitchen's diction is crisp, her tone never fulsome, her purview precisely as stated in the title. Landscapes in all directions, always in focus, her father often in the foreground, held there by love and anguish. This book is a treasure house."-Maxine Kumin

"Judith Kitchen is a gifted writer of immense humanity, grace, and depth. Travel with her, trusting where she takes you. These essays gleam with wisdom and innate poetry. Whether a trail spins out in widening spirals or penetrates deep layers of memory, readers are nourished by the journey-lo, uplifted!-and gratefully changed."-Naomi Shihab Nye

"It's proper that Judith Kitchen's title emphasizes 'distance,' for this book is a kind of travel diary (from Macedonia to the at-home wastes of a bombed-apart Okalahoma City; from Yellowstone Park to Berlin-except it's Berlin, Wisconsin) as well as a literate reminder that we can journey even more deeply into the mind and the heart than we can across the globe. There are, in fact, individual sentences here that might be measured in light years. 'The Chinese fused sunset with flamingo,' she tells us, and ably performs her own amazing fusions: the present, wedded to memory; intellectual rigor, enlivened by poetry's flash; those waves of the human condition that float us all, made one with intimate moments from the author's own richly-felt life. 'We cannot know more than what we've done together.' Well, it's a pleasure to 'do together' with Judith Kitchen."-Albert Goldbarth

"Judith Kitchen's Distance and Direction is a meditative, visceral, enigmatic ('I miss places I've never seen') romp of sensibility, at once meshing reminiscences of place (and therefore of time) with one of her well-known strengths-astute, personal examinations of some of her favorite writers. I love her range as much as I do her acuity."-Stephen Dunn

Kitchen has a light touch. She’s a piccolo player, a bird, a watercolorist, a tightrope walker. Her essays are at once lyrical and staccato as she matches words to feelings and the world’s amazing beauty, its poppies and hills, sunlight and shadows. Her essays, threaded through with memoir, are gentle and lithe studies of place and the complex emotions place arouses. Sketches of the secretive, orchard-laced terrain of upstate New York and the “landscape of the soul” that is Ireland call up thoughts of the deep, haunting past as well as of departed loved ones. Like a poet, Kitchen fixes on odd, resonant facts, such as Fred Astaire’s dislike of his hands, which prompts musings on the divide between how others see us and how we see ourselves. Gliding, as the most fluent and stirring essayists do, between observation and philosophy, carefully collected knowledge and inexplicable impressions, the mutability of memory and experience and the steadfastness of the earth, Kitchen captures the shimmer of consciousness, the most fascinating place of all. – Donna Seaman, Booklist