Kazimierz Square - Softcover

Chase, Karen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0967885604 ISBN 13: 9780967885605

Publisher: CavanKerry Press, 2000

Synopsis

A collection of power and humor in earthy eroticism, invoking both the fever and hope in wakeful dreams. A bold work of the elegiac past and the visceral present converging in provocative imagery. There is often an undercurrent of longing in Chase’s poems―the longing of hunger, of sex, of unfinished business with the dead. Central to the collection is the title poem, a spiraling nightmare that explores the messy and terrifying commingling of religion, death and history’s unpardonable sins.

About this title

About the Author

Among her honors, KAREN CHASE has been recipient of a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and numerous grants, including several from The Witter Bynner Foundation For Poetry and The Rockefeller Foundation. She was poet-in-residence at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, a large psychiatric hospital, poetry teacher to severely disturbed patients and a guest lecturer at the Lally School of Management and Technology (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) as part of a course called Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, co-taught by Ivar Giaever, Nobel Laureate in physics. She is the founder and director of the Camel River Writing Center in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Reviews

Poet, publisher and clinical psychologist Joan Cusack Handler (no relation to the Hollywood Cusacks) named the New Jersey-based CavanKerry after the two Irish counties from which her parents came. Chase's debut is the second title for the press, and it begins with poems set a bit further east, in Poland, where present-day peasants, poverty and mud suggest at once the logic of fairy-tale worlds and the specters of the Holocaust. All these realms merge in the title sequence, where the agitated poet imagines herself transformed to a "brown-furred wild boar." Chase's short lines and transient stanzas at once seek casual appeal and chiseled grace in a variety of styles and forms, and use them to talk about differing kinds of experience: poems about Italy don't sound like poems about Poland, and her pair of poems on a visit to Iceland adopt a starker attitude still. Other works, though, seem tossed off, dependent on simplistic concepts: "The A B C of What I've Been Called" zips through "Baby, Buddy, Bitch and Babe" before settling on "Zena Block's daughter." The late Amy Clampitt, in a short introduction, praises Chase's "raw power," and the stark alertness and verbal clarity of the poems should attract fans of Marie Ponsot and Elizabeth Macklin, while her particular subjects may give her an audience broader still. It's an apt book for a press that aims to "introduc[e] a literary audience to books that focus on both the aesthetic as well as the psychological impediments to the expression of voice." (Dec..-- a literary audience to books that focus on both the aesthetic as well as the psychological impediments to the expression of voice." (Dec.)
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Venison

Paul set the bags down, told how they had split the deer apart, the ease of peeling it simpler than skinning a fruit, how the buck lay on the worktable, how they sawed an anklebone off, the smell not rank. The sun slipped into night.

Where are you, I wondered as I grubbed through cupboards for noodles at least. Then came venison new with blood, stray hair from the animal's fur. Excited, we cooked the meat.

Later, I dreamt against your human chest, you cloaked me in your large arms, then went for me the way you squander food sometimes. By then, I was eating limbs in my sleep, somewhere in the snow alone, survivor of a downed plane, picking at the freshly dead. Whistles of a far off flute - legs, gristle, juice. I cracked an elbow against a rock, awoke. Throughout the night, we consumed and consumed.

Edition details

• Publisher: CavanKerry Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0967885604
• ISBN 13: 9780967885605
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 74