Lizard Dream

lizard dream

ISBN 9780982354254

Karen Kevorkian’s most powerful poems – “An Interruption,” “A Fall That Occurred in Recent History,” and “Five O’Clock,” among others – are intricate, dense, and resonant constructions whose affect is deep and precise, thus – in the strict philosophical sense – irreducible.
—David Lee Rubin, Chair, Poetry Board, The Virginia Quarterly Review

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

The epigraph for [the poem "It Was the Idea of Them" in White Stucco Black Wing], chosen from Maurice Blanchot, fits not only this work, but perhaps encompasses the direction of the book itself: "That despair verged upon rapture. . . "

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, Blackbird