Worrisome Creatures: Poems
by Kate Sweeney
Gold Medalist in the poetry category
of the 2022 Florida Book Awards!
ISBN: 978-1-948692-82-3 paperback $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-948692-83-0 ebook $9.99
poetry
May 2022
This is a collection of the body, of the failings of history and family. The range is wide and balanced—in geography, in tenderness and trauma, in startling imagery, craft, and heart. 
Kate Sweeney’s work takes me within and outside myself, making both realms real and seen/felt as if for the first time. In fact, much of the collection feels like entering uncharted territory—and how intriguing to explore it! Here is a master poet and, as the highest compliment, I wish I could write poems like those in Worrisome Creatures.
—Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth
Kate Sweeney Kate Sweeney is the author of the chapbook Better Accidents (Yellow Jacket Press, 2009). Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Tampa Review, and Poet Lore, among others.
What People Are Saying About Worrisome Creatures:
In this sharply observed account of the subtle and not-so-subtle varieties of violence we visit upon one another, often on those we love best, Kate Sweeney reflects on the relationships families sustain and sometimes unravel. To have a child is to consign oneself to a lifetime of worry, and these vibrant and moving poems wrestle with this constraint as they delineate the consequences of loving and the various impositions we visit on those we live with. The poems meditate on our fragilities and strengths and, more broadly, observe the burdens we impose on the landscape we live in in this complex and deeply intriguing collection.—Sidney Wade, author of Bird Book and Straits & Narrows Reading Worrisome Creatures is like paging through a family album, images rich with loss and love, and then walking the beach at the continent’s edge, along history’s wrack line. With a voice intimately, achingly authoritative, Kate Sweeney’s poems startle us with both the familiar and the exotic.
—Elizabeth Dodd, editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance and Democracy, and author of Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World
Kate Sweeney’s debut collection Worrisome Creatures bursts with beauty, humor, frank confidences, and nervy resolution. With pitstops across America and the decades, these poems range over everything from pregnancy, motherhood and exes to cockroaches, invasive trees, her own jealousies and other people’s stupidity. Sweeney deploys fresh, startling images in these lines and bolsters them with both tenderness and wit. Worrisome Creatures announces the arrival of a poet in full command of her craft and a worldy-wise voice that is just right for this moment.
—Gianna Russo, Wordsmith of the City of Tampa and author of All I See Is Your Glinting and One House Down
kpdavis –
Kate Sweeney has serious grit in her work. It’s a family album of sorts, but it is peopled by characters who might have walked of Flannery O’Connor’s pages. Worrisome Creatures delightful in a grungy sort of way.