Named after a workaday knife wielded by shepherds and farmers in the high pastures of the Alps when a tool for paring, shaping, cutting into, scraping out of, or freeing is useful, these poems likewise cleave away the false and deceptive to clarify and reveal a startling and unifying wonder. In language radiant, lovely, and disturbing, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson explores the linkages between the uncomfortable familiar and the curiously intimate strange, making unexpected connections between phenomena. Arranged by association rather than chronology and connected by a sensual intelligence, this collection wanders from Maryland and India to Boston, France, New Hampshire and Irelandfrom Ezekiel's Flight and the Book of Kells, to the Tamil goddess Meenakshi. Table of Contents At the Audiologist's She Took to the Bed and Stayed Silent in the Face Stink of Dog Useless Now They Drank Whiskey in the Fifties Her Razor Like Her Mind Proximities Just Out of Reach II. Once in Orgeval Calfskin Was Calf's Skin Say Again Mirror Ode to the Rock in Front of Me Ode to the Rhododendron, Early Winter Midwinter Rhododendron Blank-Eyed at Me in the Window Yearning But Do Not Only "Weep," Take "Heart" Steadily the River Santa Catalina Shedding Up from the Earth the Air Is in Cups, My Hands My Mouth, the Ego III. Ayurvedic Massage Coconuts Incognito at the Grocery Known Gods Meenakshi, the Fish-Eyed Goddess The "O!" Palm Since Meenakshi in Starbucks' Mermaid In a Field of Slender Green Mushrooms Global Warming On the Connecticut After We Flared Those of Us Who Are Alive Flight After Death Then It's Only Raining The String That Is Notes Acknowledgments "I take it as a sign of ordinary/unknowns, says the speaker in Rebecca Kaiser Gibson's poem On the Connecticut. That's the feel of her poems. Hard-edged and edgy, they look hard at the ordinary--a narcissistic mother, rhododendron buds, mushroom spores, suburban life in the fifties--and crack these scenes into shards of new understanding. In forms of fracture, Rebecca Gibson finds forms of preservation, a vision of what emptied of remains, remains."--Rosanna Warren "Author of Ghost in a Red Hat" (1/1/2015 12:00:00 AM) "Like the wooden-handled knife it's named for, Opinel is a book that pierces and sculpts the poet's personal history into something both painfully exposed and delicately rendered. With an incisive eye for the minute and mystifying, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson offers us an elegant book dedicated to extreme attention--to grief, to loss, to encounters, and to the forgotten items in the dusty trunk of oneself. With an understated yet munificent voice she asks, without irony or ego, why not lengthen myself belly first, sensing? so that we all might, like the animals we are, perform this graceful act of observation together."--Ada Limon "Author of Bright Dead Things" (1/1/2015 12:00:00 AM) "Sharply observed, intensely felt, and alive with crisp images and surprising diction, the poems of Opinel range over painful childhood memories, adult immersions in 'foreign' cultures, and the mysteries at the heart of long-lasting, self-renewing love. In all Rebecca Kaiser Gibson weighs and sifts experience, assays it not only for its worth, but also for its hints about undiscovered meanigns and complexities of feeling. The sturdy, all-purpose peasant knife that gives this collection its title tours out to be an image of the poet's mind at work, an instrument that enables her to peel back the surfaces, restlessly hoping that a revelation might be here, vivid and real, in what she holds in her hands."--Fred Marchant "Author of The Looking House" (1/1/2015 12:00:00 AM) "Thank you for your depth and these lyrical almost ethereal poems. There's a gentleness even though the images speak of violence. We love the images and the sound of your poems."-- "The Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art" (1/1/2015 12:00:00 AM) I take it as a sign of ordinary/unknowns, says the speaker in Rebecca Kaiser Gibson's poem "On the Connecticut." That's the feel of her poems. Hard-edged and edgy, they look hard at the ordinary a narcissistic mother, rhododendron buds, mushroom spores, suburban life in the fifties and crack these scenes into shards of new understanding. In forms of fracture, Rebecca Gibson finds forms of preservation, a vision of what emptied of remains, remains. Rosanna Warren, Author of Ghost in a Red Hat " Like the wooden-handled knife it's named for, Opinel is a book that pierces and sculpts the poet's personal history into something both painfully exposed and delicately rendered. With an incisive eye for the minute and mystifying, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson offers us an elegant book dedicated to extreme attention to grief, to loss, to encounters, and to the forgotten items in the dusty trunk of oneself. With an understated yet munificent voice she asks, without irony or ego, why not lengthen myself belly first, sensing? so that we all might, like the animals we are, perform this graceful act of