“Kahn speaks for our time, making full use of all the traditions of poetry, but the poems are the products of a completely unique sensibility. These poems are full of suggestion and mystery, full of strong music and vivid imagery; I have never read this kind of poetry before, and my life would be lesser if I never had.” —Laura Kasischke, author of Lightning Falls in Love

“Amidst blackberries, barns, bats, and low tides, at dead ends and ditches and traffic lights, Margot Kahn pays attention, asserts, ‘I like that I’m a woman who can still / be curious when she turns a corner.’ This is a controlled, compressed, lyrical collection of couplets and beautiful diction, of rhythmic syntax––a collection of body and time and the natural world. The Unreliable Tree also acknowledges a held history of the Holocaust, ancestors who survived, who created the legacy of this poet, who claims, ‘My whole life I’ve wanted // to be that girl––plated, chained, impenetrable. / To take the field first, to reveal myself later.’ You’ll want to read and reread these poems of motherhood and marriage, of desire and inquiry, poems that invite you to find ‘solution to dissolution: / alight in the places that will hold you. / Pass through darkness / with the swiftest grace.’ —Ellen Bass, author of Indigo

“At the beating heart of Margot Kahn’s The Unreliable Tree is the ghost of the Tree of Paradise—not the ubiquitous trash tree of suburban ditches, though one senses that Kahn would love that possibility, too—but the Old Testament tree of Eden, with its legacies of gendered agency, culpability, and desire.  At every turn, this sensuous debut poetry collection subverts and recontextualizes this story of Eve’s first mouthful (“I like a place with history, / but of fruit in myth I disagree,” she writes), honoring her female speakers in all of their vexed and generative transformations of yearning, fulfillment, travail, and care.” —Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New Selected Poems

“If you, too, have woken up somehow in midlife swamped by love and family life but also find yourself looking back fondly at the Corvettes and shag rug lawns and cheap body spray of your teenage loves, Margot Kahn's The Unreliable Tree is just the book you need. Wryly observed and finely honed, these poems conjure the reckless dangers of youth alongside the ordinary terrors and wonder of marriage and parenthood.” —Nancy Reddy, author of The Good Mother Myth
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