Lizard Dream - Softcover

Kevorkian, Karen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0982354258 ISBN 13: 9780982354254

Publisher: What Books Press, 2009

Synopsis

Poetry. "Kevorkian finds the extraordinary in patterns of everyday life. Whether moving through an arid landscape of desert flora, exploring the waving of inflatable tube men, or registering the incessant barking of dogs, her poems discover 'something hidden // in all this'--a wellspring of meaning and wonder. Intimate, loving, and spare, LIZARD DREAM casts the familiar in a brilliant luster"--Joshua Kryah.

About this title

About the Author:

Karen Kevorkian lives in Los Angeles where she teaches poetry and fiction writing workshops at UCLA.Her new poetry collection is LIZARD DREAM, published by What Books Press, the imprint of the Glass Table Collective, a group of predominantly Los Angeles-based artists and writers.Her first poetry collection, White Stucco Black Wing, was published by Red Hen Press of Los Angeles in 2004. Journals publishing Kevorkian's poetry and fiction include Antioch Review, Agni, Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Mississippi Review, Witness, VOLT, Shenandoah, and Fiction International.Kevorkian has lived in LA since 2008. Before then she taught in the University of Virginia creative writing programfor six years after moving there from San Francisco.

Review:

The epigraph for [the poem "It Was the Idea of Them" in White Stucco Black Wing], chosen from Maurice Blanchot, fits not only this work, but perhaps encompasses the direction of the book itself: "That despair verged upon rapture. . . "

Karen Kevorkian's craftsmanship is meticulous. Never a word, nor comma--nor lack of comma--is unintended. Spare cubistic poems plumb deep emotional ranges. Intensities of feeling are set among mundane details of dailiness as well as elegant images of nature. The beauty of her art vivifies through its many contrasts both the anguish of lost love and the horror of our war in Iraq and mysteriously provides links between them. This small volume keeps pulling me back with its density of meaning and the heft of its exquisite creations. --Mary Lee Allen, Blackbird

Karen Kevorkian's most powerful poems--"An Interruption," "A Fall That Occurred in Recent History," and "Five O'Clock," among others--are intricate, dense, and resonant constructions whose affect is deep and precise, thus--in the strict philosophical sense--irreducible. --David Lee Rubin, Chair, Poetry Board, The Virginia Quarterly Review

Kevorkian finds the extraordinary in patterns of everyday life. Whether moving through an arid landscape of desert flora, exploring the waving of inflatable tube men, or registering the incessant barking of dogs, her poems discover "something hidden // in all this"--a wellspring of meaning and wonder. Intimate, loving, and spare, Lizard Dream casts the familiar in a brilliant luster. --Joshua Kryah, Witness

About this edition

• Publisher: What Books Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0982354258
• ISBN 13: 9780982354254
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 92