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

In Quivira, Karen Kevorkian reconfigures a pastoral topography populated by memory and disrupted by a history of unacknowledged violence. The body’s memory and the recovery of its elisions are localized in the landscapes of New Mexico, the Southwest, and Los Angeles. “Where men strap on leaf blowers” and “in fantasies of Spanish stucco” Kevorkian evokes the longing for a present embodied by the truths of genocide and the acknowledgment of common loss. Among the mudbricked churches, “the little mustached saints’ bedroomy eyes,” the “tin wings of angelitos,” the Catholic hand-carved icons scrubbed clean of conquest of colonization, Kevorkian recovers the scars, the beauty, and the sensuality of living among the ghosts of History and memory.
—Ramón García, The Chronicles

Who is speaking throughout these poems? The delight is in the blur: First-person becomes every-person, every-person a layered construct of past-and-present persons, and over all of this breathes the vast American West, which is itself a simultaneity—of time frames, landscapes, and cross-hatched journeys. Kevorkian’s third poetry collection is redolent with history, especially the history of cultures’ shifting claims over a region that remains resolutely itself—volcanic, untamable, partially mapped. Its laminate past is evoked through specific detail and moments of electrifying phrasing which nevertheless leave space for the reader to grasp not just a panorama of fleeting observations, but a tremendous intelligence at work.
—Leslie Ullman, Library of Small Happiness

Reading Quivira, acute with restless shifting syntax and delineations as precise and startling as the “mottled sky a blue and white / cow blasting through broken window panes,” one is captivated by the view, instantly recognizable and riven with sensibility. Encountering Karen Kevorkian’s poems, one is caught up in an existential quest, both real and imagined, haunted by history and absence, driven by desire, “waking. . . to an “unseen / reliable trill” with “so many ifs and conditionals lying at your feet.”
—Rebecca Seiferle, Wild Tongue

Karen Kevorkian’s power resides in quiet ferocity, in her sunwetted “deviations of color / the mind like a desert a wheel turning,” from the poet’s hand to the live page where nature, the self, and politics can all become part of the same architectural vocabulary. Her latest book, Quivira, comes to us, “the body surprised,” physically layered and incantatory as longing, as “hoarse horn bay cries,” as certain sights like “lichenmottled rock.” The book’s overall lush, rapacious intelligence sees with the elegance of a wild animal at ease—in other words, Kevorkian has translated and become part of the literal, once metaphorical, landscape to create something philosophically beautiful.
—Elena Karina Byrne, Squander