"Karen Kovacik's poems are strong, distinctive and thoroughly wonderful works. Her personal poems such as 'Watching My Father Pray' make use of autobiographical detail in a way that is never insular or hermetic. And her Richard Nixon persona poems are stunning, brave, and original. American poetry, and American writing in general, tends to be sadly ahistorical, and the way these poems take on one of history's most loved and hated figures, giving him voice and making him human, is truly impressive. Nixon and I is an amazing debut."--Jesse Lee Kercheval
"Karen Kovacik's poems are strong, distinctive and thoroughly wonderful works. Her personal poems such as 'Watching My Father Pray' make use of autobi...
In Beyond the Velvet Curtain, Karen Kovacik illustrates Czeslaw Miloxz's dictum that "the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person." Peopled with such diverse characters as Richard Nixon, Nikita Khruschev, Kafka's father, Dorothea Lange, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Welk, Robespierre, and a feisty Catholic saint, this original collection of poems takes us on an amusement-park ride through world history and art. Kovacik's poetry places us in the strange drama of cataclysmic events and ordinary life.
In Beyond the Velvet Curtain, Karen Kovacik illustrates Czeslaw Miloxz's dictum that "the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to rem...
In Beyond the Velvet Curtain, Karen Kovacik illustrates Czeslaw Miloxz's dictum that "the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person." Peopled with such diverse characters as Richard Nixon, Nikita Khruschev, Kafka's father, Dorothea Lange, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Welk, Robespierre, and a feisty Catholic saint, this original collection of poems takes us on an amusement-park ride through world history and art. Kovacik's poetry places us in the strange drama of cataclysmic events and ordinary life.
In Beyond the Velvet Curtain, Karen Kovacik illustrates Czeslaw Miloxz's dictum that "the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to rem...
"Wow What a book The tradition of women's writing that flows out of the work of Symborska and Anna Swir--the way this mighty tradition turns in the hands of a younger generation from the traumatic history of their country to a poetics of everyday life, of play, and experiment. An absolutely rich and appealing book."--Robert Hass
"These cosmopolitan, multilingual poets speak to us across the decades, overcoming a great silence, redirecting the myths, reimagining the role of the poet, and the nature of poetry itself. Scattering the Dark is a useful, subversive, even necessary...
"Wow What a book The tradition of women's writing that flows out of the work of Symborska and Anna Swir--the way this mighty tradition turns in t...
