Karen Volkman is the author of Crash's Law (Norton, 1996), a National Poetry Series selection, and Spar (University of Iowa Press, 2002), which received the Iowa Poetry Prize and the 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, American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, and The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry. Recipient of awards from the NEA, the Poetry Society of America, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and the Bogliasco Foundation, she has taught at serveral universities, including the University of Alabama, University of Pittsburgh, University of Chicago, and Columbia College Chicago. She currently lives in Missoula and teaches at the University of Montana.

Other poems by Karen Volkman in Verse Daily:
December 29, 2006:   "Sonnet" " Nice knuckle, uncle. Nice hat, hornet...."
April 18, 2005:  "Sonnet" ""That's what it says to the bloomingest more..."

Books by Karen Volkman: Nomina, Spar, Crash's Law

Other poems on the web by Karen Volkman:
"Sonnet"
"[I have a friend. My friend is a sky.]"
"Poem"
"Sonnet"

About Nomina:

"Always exhilarating and often sad, their linguistic verse matched only by their rigorous control, Volkman's sonnets take nothing as given: they make the whole language her own. Traditional as Petrarch in their rhymes, as willful as Emily Dickinson in their sense, and very much in the Petrachan and anti-Petrarchan traditions of flight and pursuit lines `make noon a noun imperatives erase,/ the gown unraveled at the hem; they stay as wild as any living writer even while following all the form's old rules. `What are wounds for?' they ask, and answer: wounds lead us to words `never got, and never thought' till now, words enmeshed in these poems' torques and evident in their polychromatic shimmer. Volkman's verse incorporates and rifts on Rimbaud's psychedelic vowels, Stevens's fluent mundo, Eurydice's afterlife, Hart Crane's regrets, and the Romantic refusal to accept whatever the poet cannot transform: on Volkman's 'earth, blue egg' as in her poems, `Nothing was ever what it claimed to be.' On the one hand, these are sonnets you'll want to read slowly; on the other, you may find that you can't put them down."
—Stephen Burt