The synthesis of experience and curiosity that Larson no doubt uses in her work as a field ecologist and research scientist is here applied to verse. The natural world has never felt more physical, more alive with tiny movements and infinite textures—and so titillating, as when she writes, “We hear the cactus whisper / pollinate me furry moth.”

-Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review

Poem by poem, Radial Symmetry exhibits an extraordinary wakefulness, an immersion in nuance that enriches experience… immediacy comes with intimacy, a word which recurs throughout the book, and suggests the contiguities among different forms of life and between people, even strangers. "Djenné, Mali" vividly conjures the place's market day and concludes with a standkeeper taking the speaker's hand in her hennaed one: "Radiant palm to my palm–/ Hot flowers with such patient faces." In an impoverished town, or disappearing marine environment, such tenderness evokes our sense of humanity, just one of many insights in this impressive debut.

-Carrie Etter, The Independent

The book, Radial Symmetry, earned Larson the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, which since it started in 1919 has honored promising young poets for their first books, poets such as John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich and Robert Hass, titans whom Larson can stand with. She is that good, and her style captures and expands on some of the most significant stylistic achievements of contemporary American verse.

-Adam Plunkett, BOOKFORUM

As a poet and research ecologist, Larson allows her scientific background into the poems but doesn’t attitudinize cold and objective scientific investigation as art; rather, reading the collection, we find tender poetic reckonings nuanced by science, replete with the ineffable, the unknowable, a creation that touts fact as “[a] fullness only partially fathomed.”  

Radial Symmetry deserves attention not because Larson’s background fulfills some curiosity for readers but because of the profuse landscapes, sophisticated yet unidealized insights, and sultry language she renders without conceit, posture, or willful obfuscation. Above all, and we should remember, Katherine Larson is a poet writing poetry that attempts a scrupulous look at a violent and arresting world.

-Emilia Phillips, Blackbird

Larson’s language also extends antennae (as far as it is possible) into the immeasurable spaces between related objects. The reaching – for speaker and reader – develops as a necessary, stimulating, gorgeous, provisional gesture. But there is nothing tentative about the fearful symmetry and impact of Larson’s book.

-Ron Slate, On the Seawall

In her recent collection of poems, Radial Symmetry, Yale Younger Series-winner Katherine Larson examines our culture’s increasingly stark division between scientist and artist, and ultimately makes a strong case for reassessing it. A research scientist herself, Larson explores how science and art collapse into each other, articulating her experiences in sensual, Cartesian terms—and the result is work that is both intellectually and emotionally engaging.

-Tory Adkisson, Ploughshares

I love the way Larson seamlessly reintroduces soft, emotional facets to the perceived objective and cold nature of scientific artifacts. In her poetry, science has room to breach the rigid bounds of objectivity and to expand, to branch, radially and emotionally, into something breathtakingly artistic: a dissected squid has “gills creased like satin,” and its formaldehyde-preserved heart “blooms” like a flower, expanding “between cubes of ice.”

-Callie Cho, The Phoenix