Karen Kevorkian has also lived in Austin, Richmond, Salt Lake, Berkeley, San Francisco, Charlottesville, Santa Monica, and now Culver City, with a stop along the way in Taos. Now teaching at UCLA, Kevorkian's new book of poems is published by the Glass Table Collective, a group of Los Angeles-based artists and writers dedicated to combining literature of quality with original art. Kevorkian's interest in well-made, illustrated books has been fostered by an interest in letterpress printing; which she'll follow at the Horn Press at UCLA. Formerly a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Virginia, there she was part of a letterpress printing group at the Virginia Arts of the Book Center, an interest that had its genesis when she worked as an editor and production coordinator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Her first book of poems is White Stucco Black Wing (Red Hen Press, 2004). Journals publishing her poetry and fiction include Archipelago, Antioch Review, Agni Online, Drunken Boat, Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Mississippi Review, Witness, Virginia Quarterly Review, VOLT, Third Coast, Shenandoah, and Fiction International. She has held fellowships from the Djerassi, Ucross, and Wurlitzer foundations, and the Millay and MacDowell colonies.

Other poems by Karen Kevorkian in Verse Daily:
November 28, 2006:   "Once I Was in Wyoming" " Once I was in Wyoming..."

Books by Karen Kevorkian:

Other poems on the web by Karen Kevorkian:
Eight poems
Fourteen poems

About Lizard Dream:

"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

"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

"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