Books
Here in My Body it Feels Crowded
Walton Well Press, 2025
“Kevorkian reminds us, powerfully so, that the meaning of our lives—their poignancy and lushness, their arc of time, is built from noticing, and noticing is an art. I can’t remember the last time I read work so familiar yet strange.”
—Louise Mathias, What if the Invader is Beautiful
Quivira
Three: A Taos Press, 2020
“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, Self-Portrait with Dogwood
Lizard Dream
What Books Press, 2009
“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
White Stucco Black Wing
Ren Hen Press, 2004
“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