Books

“Quivira, Karen Kevorkian’s dazzling new collection of poems, explores the ways in which time can be measured in movement—in her case through the vast, riveting, and often bewildering spaces of the American West. Voices, familiar and otherwise, inhabit these poems, which ceaselessly interrogate the land and its varieties of human and nonhuman experience: “what an idea trying to outrun / the fire,” she writes, “in a moment / on you.” No one escapes the fire in these poems, which will burn for a very long time to come.”
–Christopher Merrill

 

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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 effect is deep and precise, thus—in the strict philosophical sense—irreducible.”

—David Lee Rubin

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In the poems of White Stucco Black Wing, Karen Kevorkian offers a meditation on the body as at once our source of knowing and our record of “what passes and passes / away”—that world that we’re necessarily always leaving, making it all the more imperative that we look closely. These poems give refreshing witness to that imperative.”

—Carl Phillips