Poems by Karen Volkman
American Poets Continuum Series
Nomina is a book of sonnets, most adhering to a traditional Petrarchan rhyme scheme. Far from a tidy closed form, Volkman's sonnets are volatile, sometimes violent instruments, resounding with struggle and shock. They embody a fascinating contradiction: the resolute character of the form's syntax and the solidity and decisiveness of its rhyme scheme pressing toward a certainty that its conflicted, argumentative stance questions and resists. What is the relationship of a musical structure to other systems – natural, divine, emotional, physiological? How do forms of intelligence interrelate? How is constraint a base for intuitive leaping, a mode of freedom? How is the poem a thinking body? Nomina is constructed as a kind of metaphysical sequence revolving these different concerns, sometimes echoing key words to create a series of unifying recurrences across the whole. While the concerns are abstract, the material qualities of sound and meter provide solidity and grounding and a high degree of sensual pleasure to the reader.
Say Sad
Say sad. Say sun's a semblance of a bled
blanched intransigence, collecting rue
in ray-stains. Smirching pages. Takes its cue
from stateless stamens, flanging. Florid head
got no worries, waitless. Say you do. Say
photosyntheses. Light, water, airy bread.
What eats its source, its orbit? Something bad:
some plural petal that will not root or ray.
Sow stray. Salt night for saving, dreaming clay
for heap, for hefting. Originary ash
for stall and stilling. Say it will, it said.
Corolla corona, bliss-bane--delay
surge and sediment. Say instrument and gash
and ruminant remnant. Rex the ruse. Be dead.
Available editions:
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Cloth
ISBN: 978-1-934414-07-1
Price: $21.00
Publishing Date: April 2008
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-934414-06-4
Price: $16.00
Publishing Date: April 2008
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BOA Editions, Ltd. would like to thank the following generous Publishing Partners for their support of Nomina:
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