Welcome to Strength Reversed!
I’m Kayla Krut, poet and writing guide, and You have found Strength Reversed, the most public arm of my writing life. This newsletter started because I wanted a source of refreshmenet and motivation as I prepared to publish my first manuscript of literary criticism ("‘A Blessing in Disguise:’ Spiritual Pedagogy in John Ashbery")1 and as I negotiate the shift out of US academia and into expat independent scholarship and spiritual writing mentorship.
“True criticism recognizes itself as a form of memoir.”
—Harold Bloom
Strength Reversed stores and shares fruits of my ongoing practice of “Contemplative Nonfiction,” an informal reflective mode that complements my more formal writing practices of poetry—my deepest vocation—and literary and cultural criticism.
In this spirit, both forms and contents of Strength Reversed vary widely: there are lyrical personal essays, but there are also crash courses in various humanities threads for nonacademics, as well as primers on therapeutic techniques for immediate application in the reader's life.
This experimental gathering of essays, poems, and integrative spirals also works to supplement my writing mentorship service as an open resource, part model, part reference bibliography, for my clients as they develop and deepen their own writing practices.
Examples of previous Strength Reversed essay topics include vocation and meditation; psychedelic drugs, culture, and experience; Silicon Valley and pain as teacher; how to "faith heal" the broken education system; literal & figurative homelessness; expatriation & the psychic wound of American exceptionalism; the absence of art in the elite MFA workshop; astrology and Human Design; critical reviews of self-help & healing books; surrender in Meister Eckhart; Postmodern poetics and Zen . . .
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ABOUT KAYLA: I have written three books of poetry, two travel memoirs, and one novel, and in September 2025 submitted a doctoral dissertation manuscript on poetics and mystical consciousness, revisions for which will begin any day now...
I studied creative writing, literature, and humanities at the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz) and University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). My scholarly interests are poetry and poetics, “mysticism” and contemplative studies, and liberatory pedagogies (more stuff I dig here). My writing mentorship proceeds from this living research.
Born and raised in California, I live and write in Vienna, Austria.
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Why “Strength Reversed”?
In the realm of Tarot, the Strength card can represent inner fortitude and confidence. In the image of the woman gently opening the lion’s mouth, I see the transformation of our raw power (including what’s held captive in primal shadow/dysregulation) into clear-eyed ally via the application of compassion and courage. Reversed, the card acts as an antidote to perfectionism, a reminder not to take this quest for self-improvement too seriously. The “self” in “self-transformation” is a paradox: both the delusionally unreal personality of ego, and also the perceptual vehicle through which we access the collective, AKA the divine... Strength gathers in an environment of acceptance and gentle self-correction.
Dissertation Areas of Interest: Attention Studies, Contemplation, Contemplative Pedagogy, Contemplative Studies, Esotericism, Lyric Theory, the Lyric “I,” Mysticism, New Lyric Studies, New Age Spirituality, Philosophy of the Subject, Phenomenology of the Body, Postsecular Theory, Psychedelics and Altered States of Consciousness, Queer Theory, Romantic Ecopoetics, Radical Pedagogy, Somatics, Trauma Studies
