Nomina - by Karen Volkman (Paperback)

About the Book

Winner of the James Laughlin Award and Iowa Prize returns with a mind-bending sonnet collection.

Book Synopsis

Karen Volkman's first book, Crash's Law, was a National Poetry Series selection, published by W.W. Norton in 1996. Her second book, Spar, received the Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2002 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Norton Introduction to Poetry.

From "Brown is the flat"

Brown is the flat gestation of a maze,
grass-grown remembrance of a second look
the field holds open like a nascent book
in which the wind has written, Sudden strays,
sudden numbers beat--the roots of days
branched intangibles a stupor took
and slept and stroked and scattered in a shook
haze of wakenings, refracting rays
outleaping their seasons, daughters of a glance
ago--ahead, a retrograde advance.

Review Quotes

"There is no question that these are athletic poems; they open their fullest flower to those with a strong vocabulary...This abstract web of multiple meanings feels, on first reading, extremely reticent, even rarefied. When the words are illuminated against the sonics, however, the poems literally explode...It is extremely fine work, and finely wrought."
--Poetry International #17

About the Author

Karen Volkman's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and elsewhere. She has taught at NYU, the New School, the 92nd Street Y, University of Alabama, University of Pittsburgh, Columbia College Chicago, and University of Chicago. She currently teaches in the MFA writing program at University of Montana in Missoula.