Jen Karetnick is a 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, the author of 11 collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), the winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award. Her work has won the Sweet: Lit Poetry Prize, Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Roundhouse Foundation, Wassaic Projects, Write On, Door County, Centrum, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, and elsewhere. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Cimarron Review, NELLE, Pleiades, Plume, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, South Dakota Review, and other venues.

Other poems by Jen Karetnick in Verse Daily:
August 11, 2019:   "Internment" "Before the fistfuls of soil refill the hole, the names like bells peal..."
December 11, 2016:   "The President of People Fooling Themselves" "Forcing a bow tie on a bankrupt foundation..."
August 6, 2016:   "What My Autopsy Will Reveal" "The glass houses of organs were bottles..."

Other poems on the web by Jen Karetnick:
"Natural Selection"
Two poems
"Mango: An Inheritance with a High Error Rate"
"Post-Menopausal Love Poem That Begins with Guilt and Ends with Air Plants"
"Segments of an Orange"
Two poems
"Yeast"
"I Commiserate with the Pygmy Octopus Found in the Miami Beach Parking Garage"
"Under the Weather"
"Babka"
"Borromean Rings"
"127 Uses for Palm Trees"

Jen Karetnick's Website.

Jen Karetnick on Twitter.

About Inheritance with a High Error Rate:

"So much these days is abstracted by the meaningless language of politics, 24-hour news reels, social media, and disinformation. What the best poets do at their best is to counter that by ascribing authentic experiences and bearing witness to add new dimensions to discourse. This is exactly what Jen Karetnick accomplishes on the matter of climate change, with an authentic pounding of the heart, with a clear mind that explores terror as well as wonder, and with a soul that sees how the natural world connects concretely to womanhood, motherhood, and relationships of every kind. All this through the dexterity of her language that is as evocative and complex as nature itself in all its lushness, grit, grace, power, and vulnerability."
—Richard Blanco

"The poems in INHERITANCE WITH A HIGH ERROR RATE carry environmental angst and individual, quotidian worries, and also manage to bound with wit and rhythm. From the edge of the Atlantic, in a landscape rife with moist heat, Jen Karetnick sees the 'too-early bounty' of fruit. Here too is the body with its sharp struggles and markings of age. In form and in free verse, this resonant collection circles alarm, granting a hard-won, clear-eyed survival. 'This is enough wealth to grip.'"
—Lauren Camp

"Jen Karetnick is a poet who homes and listens and knows a place 'as if the land itself is both mind and body.' In her glorious fifth poetry collection, INHERITANCE WITH A HIGH ERROR RATE, she writes with formal invention into the shifting foundations of the subtropics and its precarious balance of flora and fauna, soil and sea. Of the pygmy octopus found in a parking garage, she says, 'All three of your hearts were born to know what dying is.' Amidst displacement and upheaval, she continually reaches for the bounty of mangoes, the faith of ants, the language of gumbo limbo, oolite, bananaquit, and fetterbush. In her empathetic rendering of what builds and breaks a landscape, Karetnick has written a masterful paean to 'the preservation of all that we have been given.'"
—Jennifer K. Sweeney