Author Description

In this collection, van Berkum deftly recalls the muddle of childhood and recaptures an awakening to life in the world. Flowers and puddles, crows and bison are transfigured into emblems of desire and give way to a plain-spoken queer love in a sequence of poems that record deep, irredeemable loss. The poet writes with an urgency, lines that sprawl or shrink as if she is trying to map a retreating horizon. The whole book... invites the reader to attend to the interstices between our lives and our experience of the world, reminding us that the earth is alive with magic, that the most powerful witchcraft might still be love.... Warren is a festival of wisdom and pleasure, qualities captured in poems both beautifully felt and rendered. A love of life permeates even the darkest poems, and these bright moments celebrate their opposites. When a bit of well-travelled chocolate is fished from the bottom of a “crummy pack” during a hiking picnic, the speaker and her father agree, “It tasted good on the mountain / And it tastes good now....” In poem after poem, life and its encounters are treasured. She writes, “Nobody lives that long and we know it,” and Karina van Berkum’s book adds to the pleasure of life in the best way: reading Warren, one feels renewed and refreshed.—John Skoyles, author of Driven and Suddenly It’s Evening: Selected Poems Playful and erudite, Karina van Berkum’s poems tease the limits of language. van Berkum’s inventive syntax and lexicon open multiple worlds, the “no” and the “yes” of things ballast these poems. From lyrebirds to lovers, from quantum entanglement to Greenland to the percussion of clocks, these poems “take the feral shine.” —Sue Standing, author of False Horizon... a voice so original and winning it’s impossible not to get swept up in its inquisitive wisdom. Here a child’s fairy-tale-like observations of an imaginary world (far sturdier than the world of wearisome facts that make everything“less wonderful”) make way f