White Stucco Black Wing
Wall with Trees, 1976 (detail), by Catherine Wagner,
photograph, artwork courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Read poems from White Stucco Black Wing:
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
Through the white heat of language, a painterly imagination, and headlong into “a story hinted at unread,” these poems strike at the very heart of being. Karen Kevorkian takes us to that rare and ravishing place in poetry, “to look at the thing and in the looking become.” This is one wonderful book, as full of life as life is.
—Gillian Conoley
Karen Kevorkian’s poems are hip enough to understand that in a white and black world there is only unfinished understanding. Only unfinished business, so to speak, and therein their human condition is pure presence.
—Ralph Angel
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