Volkman, Karen

Crash's Law: Poems (National Poetry Series)

Average customer rating:

Jump-off-the-page brilliant work
new art
I think it is an excellent first book
Crash's Law Crashes

Crash's Law: Poems (National Poetry Series)
Karen Volkman
Manufacturer: W W Norton & Co Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Anthologies | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Spar (Iowa Poetry Prize)
Catastrophe of Rainbows (CSU Poetry Series)
Some Things Words Can Do [Includes A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet, orig. pub. in 1993]

ASIN: 0393039560

Book Description

Winner of the 1995 National Poetry Series, judged and selected by Heather McHugh. Through myth, dream, and sensual detail, the poems in this remarkable first collection portray a hectic world plagued by a desire for psychic coherence. The book begins and ends in extremity: the opening poem, "Infernal," evokes the searing realm of an actual and metaphoric Miami, while the final poem, "New Heaven, New Earth," alludes to seeking a path through dense woods amid a blinding, obliterating blizzard. In their longing to define a set of terms for spiritual survival, these essentially lyric poems merge an evocation of contemporary consciousness with the oldest conventions of cry and song.

Customer Reviews:

Jump-off-the-page brilliant work.......2003-03-17

This is the strongest debut--and in fact the most exciting book of poems--that I have read in a long time. The poems are indeed smart (aren't poets supposed to, like, kinda know stuff?), but Volkman has such a respect for the forces of language that they are never only clever. I'd actually given up expecting to find new poems so immediately exciting that also compelled slow, tough reading.

If I had one qualm it's that the ghost of Plath, or her punchy, crackly diction, seems to haunt a couple too many poems. But I am amazed at Volkman's detractors (below). Mostly when I read those kind of comments I can see what they are getting at. In this case, I simply have no idea what they are talking about. Crash's Law is wonderful stuff: expert without being mannered (no "well-made" observations here); sharp without being slick. It's just very heartening that someone is again capable of doing work of this quality so early in her career.

The real thing, again, at last.

new art.......2002-05-02

Karen Volkman's is a voice one does want to see continue. In this book, she offers her own insights & ideas -- poetically, unuquely, metaphorically -- & embraces lyric poetry while remaining as experimental as she weants to be. Clearly she's smart, individualistic, & I'm interested to see what more poetry she proves capable of, as early books tend to be regarded as primarily only formative after the career has been attended to further.

I think it is an excellent first book.......2001-08-08

I love the wit and intelligence of Volkman's poetry.

Her work is erudite and crafty, emotionally deep and unwaveringly honest. Her many awards are richly deserved-- she is one poet who I think will have strength and staying power. Since this book's publication, I have run across her work in a variety of poetry journals, including the Paris Review, and have been impressed by her range and intelligence. She is clearly very confident and unafraid of challenging herself.

I greatly look forward to her next book. I think it is coming out soon in fact.

Crash's Law Crashes.......2001-04-12

Don't believe the hype with this book. Pretentious, deliberately opaque, and just plain boring, this is one of those books that leaves you nonplussed at how the judges of the National Poetry Series justified giving it an award. Yawn.

Average customer rating:

Absolute doggerel
alligator's tears to fearless intropection
Dense & Enticing Book
nuique compelling brilliant modern poetry
sigh

Spar (Iowa Poetry Prize)
Karen Volkman
Manufacturer: University Of Iowa Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Crash's Law: Poems (The National Poetry Series)
And Her Soul Out of Nothing (The Brittingham Prize in Poetry)
Shut Up Shut Down
Revenants
Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

ASIN: 0877458073

Book Description

Winner of the 2001 Iowa Poetry Prize. Karen Volkman's award-winning collection Spar has as its central form a highly compressed, musical variant of the prose poem. Volkman develops a new lyric density that marries the immediacy of image-centered poetry to the rhythmic resources of prose. Her first poem begins, “Someone was searching for a Form of Fire,” and this wild urge to seek form—and thus definition—in the most uncontainable of elements propels the book forward; each poem maps the mind's evolving positions in response to its variable and perilous encounters. Sometimes the encounter is romantic or purely carnal, a sensual landscape of human relations. At other times, nature itself has an almost humanly emotional connection to the speaker.

While very much a living voice, the poems' speaker is not a consistent self but a mutable figure buffeted by tenderness, terror, irony, or lust into elaborate evasions, exclamations, verbal hijinks, and lyric fiights. As its title suggests, Spar embodies both resistance and aspiration, while its epigraphs further emphasize the simultaneous allure and danger of the unknown within the sensual and material worlds and in the mind itself.

Customer Reviews:

Absolute doggerel.......2004-04-05

Google Karen Volkman online and there is this hilarious review written about her, which says what I think far better than I ever could. Volkman is a joke. That people like this teach?!?!

alligator's tears to fearless intropection.......2003-06-22

I was disappointed, at first, by the prose poem approach: what would happen to the humorous voices rounded by line breaks, alligator purses, tennis courts and humanity's other detritus? This is a poet capable of anything, including sheer beauteous irrelevancy. I wanted her to cling to the personable. But she does sustain a voice, a narrrative harkening back to embodiment, while playing with it. Very impressive. A bit cold? Performance like this can only be judged by the next permutation. I eagerly await it. I do.

Dense & Enticing Book.......2002-05-19

Karen Volkman is definitely one of the leading poets of her generation. Of this, I have no doubt. In this, her second collection, Volkman uses a denser language and syntax than in her first collection, but the effect is quite stunning. I am not a huge fan of the prose poem, but Volkman knows how to use that form well and demonstrates it in this collection over and over. This is a beautifully-written collection of poetry and is highly recommended by me to anyone interested in what the poets under 40 are writing.//C. Dale Young, Poetry Editor, NEW ENGLAND REVIEW

nuique compelling brilliant modern poetry.......2002-05-09

Karen Volkman is a very special poet, & for me this book is an absolute masterpiece in terms of aural sophistication & conceptual ingenuity. Volkman writes like no one else, & her writing is rife with great poetic decisions. Her art inspires me with its great vision & boldness. I don't know how unique to me this strong feeling of being able to relate to the thoughts she presents is, but I love it. The book starts with the poem Create Desire, which starts with the line "Someone was searching for a form of fire." Is that what life is? That you are someone searching for a form of fire? Later, she ends one of the prose poems with "Your turn." She ends one with a string of 3 vowels. She builds one by planting in your mind the suspician that she's addressing a lover, then reveals in the last few words that she is indeed. Her tropes & unexpected word choices are so exciting. One of my favorite syntgactical excerpts from the book is in one of the prose poems when she writes,"Plural keeps and cues med, does me dither. Is what is more than mind is -- when I am?" -- though that's not much of an example of her troping. Nothing she does in this book feels accidental or not fully thought through; everything feels like a perfect deliberate decision. She is aware of what prose poems do to the weight of words & the pace of the poem. She's very sparing with titles. She uses more regular lines & stanzas when she decides to. Reading this book is like riding a motorcycle with no brakes! As far as another reviewer's comment that Volkman doesn't give the reader enough information, I think the level of electric metaphor that might be abstruse is a matter of taste.... If you're interested enough in poetry to be considering this book & reading my review, do buy the book; I hope you'll be as pleased as I am.

sigh.......2002-04-12

Perhaps early success is an utter curse; I begin to wish no one were allowed to publish a 1st book till they turned 35 (note: burn your MFA theses!) Early success seems to engender a pavlovian response: what we're praised for, we do again & again. And so, here, we have Volkman repeating herself for 50-odd pages, saying nothing with stylistic cleverness equivalent to a parlor game, relying on style as a crutch to mask a startling substance deficit. One, two, three poems glimpsed here & there in our best journals were riveting; seeing 20-some all together will engender much wincing in those of us who had our hopes up. Still, I hold out hope for book three--may it be a careful slow while in coming--

PRAIRIE SCHOONER Vol. 66 No. 1 (Spring 1992)

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PRAIRIE SCHOONER Vol. 66 No. 1 (Spring 1992)
Hilda, Editor: Edith Milton, Karen Volkman, Wendy Bishop, Twyla Hansen, Greg Johnson, David Kellog, Arlene Jones, Kathy Song, Lee Lemon, Jan Bailey, Theodore Worozbyt, Daniela Drazanovd, Michael Bugeja, Rennie McQuilkin, Susan Rensberger, et al RAZ
Manufacturer: University of Nebraska
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000MDQJ5A

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