I'm happy to announce that the collaborative book of poetry titled Delight Is a Field, by Donelle Dreese, Karen George, Nancy K. Jentsch, and Taunja Thomson, has just been released by Shanti Arts, available at: https://shantiarts.co/uploads/files/jkl/JENTSCH_FIELD.html

"Delight Is a Field unfolds a world of women exploring, pondering, celebrating, and reimagining their connection to natural, wild places (field, meadow, prairie, wetland, ocean) and what inhabits them (celestial bodies, animals, plants, and fungi). These poems reveal the complexity and duality of women's lives filled with discord, chaos, longing, worry, loss accompanied by love, wonder, reverence, mystery, and magic that echoes the seasons’ cycles of change."

I had poems recently published on page 49 of Tipton Poetry Journal, and in Verse-Virtual. 

 

 

My poem “Ode to Edges” won Inscape Journal's "Ode" poetry contest: Writing Contests – Inscape

 

My short story titled "Ripping Off the Bandage" was included in Sheila-Na-Gig Editions' short fiction anthology, The Last Word & Other Stories, edited by John Bullock. https://sheilanagigblog.com/.../the-last-word-other-stories/

 

My poem “Headlong” was included in the latest issue of Thimble Literary Magazine.  Headlong

 

My prose poem “Ode to Knots,” inspired by Arthur Briscoe's 1926 "Ten Knots" appeared in The Ekphrastic Review. Ode to Knots, by Karen George - The Ekphrastic Review

 

My prose poem "How to Calibrate Nothing's Grace" was nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize by the literary journal JMWW

I had an interview with Nadia Arioli, Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of Thimble Literary Magazine, Five Questions with Karen George, published in their newsletter talking about my fourth poetry collection, Caught in the Trembling Net, published August 2024 by Kelsay Books

Shae Hall's review of my short story collection, How We Fracture, was published in Still: The Journal

I had poems published in Slippery Elm Literary Journal, Pink Panther Magazine—Women's Art and Writing, and Permafrost, both print magazines.

Three found/erasure poems created from pages of "The Book of the Damned" by Charles Fort (1919) in Heron Tree's Issue 11 at Heron Tree

Three collage/erasure poems in the latest issue of The Indianapolis Review at The Indianapolis Review

My work "Apertures," inspired by Isobelle Ouzman's 2022 altered book sculpture "The Stag," was published in The Ekphrastic Review and was nominated for the Best Microfictions 2025 Award. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BOOK RELEASE ANNOUNCEMENT

I'm happy to announce the release of my fourth poetry collection, "Caught in the Trembling Net," now available from Kelsay Books — Caught in the Trembling Net – Kelsay Books.

The poems are inspired by the life and artwork of Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Emily Carr. The collection includes prose poems, haibuns, golden shovels, and found poems created from words, lines and phrases in the artists' journals, letters, writings, and titles from their body of artwork.

Here are the blurbs from the back of the book:

Karen George takes us into the heart of three passionate, determined, brilliant, creative women, one from each nation in North America, and shows us her heart, her words, her work. These are imaginative, intimate, beautiful poems. A collection to treasure.  — Lorette C. Luzajic, founder and editor, The Ekphrastic Review

 

These ekphrastic poems, written to the paintings of three diverse artists, often culled from their own words, are exquisite. Karen George masterfully weaves Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Emily Carr into a seamless, feminist exploration that held me in thrall, first page to last. “I will heal better,” the poet declares in the opening poem of this remarkable collection. She longs for a whole “new me” eager to dissolve into embryo, embrace life anew. Join her on this quest. You won’t be disappointed. — Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Brazen, and Triggered 

 

Karen George’s Caught in the Trembling Net is a delightful delving into the art and lives of Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Emily Carr.  The collection includes so many lovely particulars, as when she writes about the shapes in O’Keeffe’s “The Lawrence Tree”: “ulnar, cervical, /radial, intercostal--a litany/ to tickle the tongue.”  Yet more than that, George invites readers to see larger truths in these works. In “The Two Frida’s,” she asks, “Isn’t everyone twinned, /split in two, bifurcated, /whittling ourselves/down to one true self?”  Ultimately, in every poem, George urges us “to step into/that aisle of light, / whelm in that gleam” (“Forest Interior in Shafts of Light,” Carr) of the art.  — Taunja Thomson, author of The Profusion and Plunge

 

COVER REVEAL

Excited to reveal the cover for my soon-to-be-released fourth poetry collection, an ekphrastic poetry collection from Kelsay Books — "Caught in the Trembling Net" — poems inspired by the art and words of Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Emily Carr.

Cover image by Wyxina Tresse & Cover design by Shay Culligan.

 

 My Latest Publications:

I had six prose poems published in The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry, a poem in the “All About My Mother” series at Silver Birch Press, and a poem in Sheila-Na-Gig.

 

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