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.

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.