Poetry

Praise for Portable City:

“Karen Kovacik translates our human condition via public places and secret time, reverence and edge: from the best spots to kiss in Warsaw . . . to the city one is stuck with that fits in a suitcase to take exotic places to be transformed. Prepare to rethink surprise, mystery and clarity, what matters finally.”—Marianne Boruch

Order Portable City here.

Read Dorian Elizabeth Knapp’s review in North American Review here.

Praise for Metropolis Burning:

“The beloved and ruined cities of Karen Kovacik’s Metropolis Burning are the substance of an individual and human history of the last century. In Warsaw, Krakow, and its near-neighbor Auschwitz; in Dresden, Prague, New Orleans, Belgrade, and Cleveland, she finds “Poetic justice: where image fits idea like a workboot.” Out of her generous heart, her strict understanding of the crimp of labor on the free imagination, and her rare sense of humor, Karen Kovacik has made a gorgeous, multi-layered music I want to listen to again and again.”—Maggie Anderson

Read a review of Metropolis Burning here.

Order Metropolis Burning here.

Praise for Beyond the Velvet Curtain, winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize:

“Karen Kovacik is an intrepid traveller; and she jauntily crosses borders, breaches privacies, and explores the deep mysteries of sexual and cultural identity in a book that is fresh and sassy, richly felt, vividly crafted, alive.”—Edward Hirsch

“Karen Kovacik can do it all. She can write vigorous and fluent Sapphics and, a time when the pantoum seems nearly bankrupt, Kovacik writes one that holds the interest like a magnet holds iron. She can write narratives of family and sexuality that are so lavishly and densely imagined, they surge off the page.”—Lynn Emanuel

Order Beyond the Velvet Curtain here.