A Library Journal 2016 Poetry Top Pick
“Karen Volkman's poems are inscrutable at first. They demand effort, but when examined these poems reveal depths teeming with microscopic life. After her previous two books, Spar, a seminal collection of love poems in prose, and Nomina, a sequence of nonsense sonnets, Volkman has relaxed mostly into free verse in which she can describe "false content,/ the splayed flower, arterial, like the premise of a door," and other vagaries of the heart. She may be elliptical and strange, but make no mistake, she is a master, able to get inside the mind of a dancer's body, for instance — "Some leg says, 'Pulse and pause, arch, flex, /contract. This is kind of a step, kind of/ sideways flying'" — and transport the willing reader into the deepest folds of true attention.” —NPR Books
“Winner of the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the James Laughlin Award, Volkman explored abstraction in her recent Nomina but here is most interested in the body and how it moves in space. Dance, performance, position—all become language: ‘Part, turn. Deflection in a space, a twist: / the beat’s swarm, the multiplying determine. // Inflect, deform.’" —Library Journal
"In her previous collection, Spar, Volkman stripped away the formal conventions of lineated verse (as well as overtly stated subject matter) to explore what a poem could say in prose, using rhythm, sound and tone as her principal tools of meaning-making. In this third collection, a sequence of 50 untitled, rhymed sonnets, she takes her interrogation of the poem as formal machine a step further, using English poetry's most famous form as her guide. Like her prose poems, these sonnets are concerned with love and some notion of a higher, or other, power, or at least with the capacity of language to bridge the gap between addressor and addressee, seeking a nascent book in which the wind has written. Channeling Emily Dickinson, the poems are at once fierce, ravished, perplexed and perplexing . . . gesturing toward sense, never quite making it, yet mysteriously giving and withholding enough to keep the reader in their thrall."
—Publishers Weekly
"There is no question that these are athletic poems; they open their fullest flower to those with a strong vocabulary . . . This abstract web of multiple meanings feels, on first reading, extremely reticent, even rarefied . . . It is extremely fine work, and finely wrought.”
—Poetry International
A Library Journal 2016 Poetry Top Pick
“Karen Volkman's poems are inscrutable at first. They demand effort, but when examined these poems reveal depths teeming with microscopic life. After her previous two books, Spar, a seminal collection of love poems in prose, and Nomina, a sequence of nonsense sonnets, Volkman has relaxed mostly into free verse in which she can describe "false content,/ the splayed flower, arterial, like the premise of a door," and other vagaries of the heart. She may be elliptical and strange, but make no mistake, she is a master, able to get inside the mind of a dancer's body, for instance — "Some leg says, 'Pulse and pause, arch, flex, /contract. This is kind of a step, kind of/ sideways flying'" — and transport the willing reader into the deepest folds of true attention.” —NPR Books
“Winner of the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the James Laughlin Award, Volkman explored abstraction in her recent Nomina but here is most interested in the body and how it moves in space. Dance, performance, position—all become language: ‘Part, turn. Deflection in a space, a twist: / the beat’s swarm, the multiplying determine. // Inflect, deform.’" —Library Journal
"In her previous collection, Spar, Volkman stripped away the formal conventions of lineated verse (as well as overtly stated subject matter) to explore what a poem could say in prose, using rhythm, sound and tone as her principal tools of meaning-making. In this third collection, a sequence of 50 untitled, rhymed sonnets, she takes her interrogation of the poem as formal machine a step further, using English poetry's most famous form as her guide. Like her prose poems, these sonnets are concerned with love and some notion of a higher, or other, power, or at least with the capacity of language to bridge the gap between addressor and addressee, seeking a nascent book in which the wind has written. Channeling Emily Dickinson, the poems are at once fierce, ravished, perplexed and perplexing . . . gesturing toward sense, never quite making it, yet mysteriously giving and withholding enough to keep the reader in their thrall."
—Publishers Weekly
"There is no question that these are athletic poems; they open their fullest flower to those with a strong vocabulary . . . This abstract web of multiple meanings feels, on first reading, extremely reticent, even rarefied . . . It is extremely fine work, and finely wrought.”
—Poetry International
