A rave new review of Karen Volkman's Whereso is featured in the latest issue of Rain Taxi. According to reviewer Cindra Halm, "Whereso observes, chronicles, and ultimately demonstrates the body in motion through topics of dance and film performances, travel and home, dreams and memories, and passageways, dramatizing issues of location and dislocation, living up to the title’s dangling, archaic gesture of indeterminacy."

Following the transcendent, abstractionist poems of Nomina, this collection returns to tangible experiences of the body—its range of expressivity and physical movement in space. Where is the body in travel? What space does it occupy in dreams and memory? With rich perplexity, Whereso responds to dance, performance, and position in time—translating flight of the body into language and line.

"Karen Volkman offers skinscapes, poems which foreground the texture of phonemes themselves, individually and in accrual . . . Like clothing’s fabric—silk, nylon, velvet, burlap—these skinscapes become the media through which the mien and meaning of internal forces and themes express."

The review notes the lineage between these poems and "Hopkins’s sprung rhythm, Stein’s insistent syllables detached from syntax, Eliot’s inventive metaphors, and Rosmarie Waldrop’s cartographies of etymological utterances."

Halm concludes, "Whereso’s expansive, 100-page volume is a rich, shapeshifting fabric that warms, worms, and wears its way from skin to in."

For more information on Whereso, visit the BOA Bookstore.