Sunday, September 5, 2021

 

New Book Released from Dos Madres Press


My third poetry collection, Where Wind Tastes Like Pears, was released August 13, 2021. It is available at: Dos Madres Press. The poems are meditations on imagination, memory, wildness, and wonder, how we connect and transform, seen through the fertile landscape of dreams. Below are the blurbs: 

Where Wind Tastes Like Pears is a unique and moving collection that nudges the world of poetry ever closer to its true self, where words create their own meanings, sing their own songs.  In a series of “found” poems, Karen George takes you on a wild, supernatural journey to find your alternate self—that person you may recognize only in your dreams.  In her dreamscapes, objects become animated, and people come back from the dead.  She takes you to that place where a mountain may propose to the moon, or where  a mother and a child “speak in a secret language/that sounds like a lark’s radiance.”  Read these poems and you, too, may awaken to a world ‘buttered with wonder.’” – Cathryn Essinger, Apricot and the Moon 

“The poems in Karen George’s Where Wind Taste Like Pears create little universes, complete unto themselves, where anything can happen. You might “come back from the dead/covered in lilies cupping light” or discover  that “a scarf of live salamanders lines a door/only your voice will unlock.” George weaves her poems with such assurance, we willingly surrender to their unfolding visions.  Most of the poems in this collection are “found” poems – assemblages of language gleaned from poets and novelists, essayists, and scientists. Their effect is at once intimate and impersonal, as if spoken by a voice loosed from personality. The poems in this wise and vivid collection speak to the heart of our deep need to dream, our hunger for poems to shelter dreaming.” – Leatha Kendrick, And Luckier 

“Karen George’s third book of poetry Where Wind Tastes Like Pears is a compelling and lush dreamscape. A master of the found poem, George deftly remixes words and phrases from existing poems to create found poems, and in Where Wind Tastes Like Pears, she combines these with her own original work. In Where Wind Tastes Like Pears, you will find not only a celebration of the senses, but a celebration of language—language that our ears cannot help but “drink and drink.” Through image-rich and haunting poems, George shepherds us headlong into a world where ‘hands gloved, feet bare, [we] climb the night.’” –   Nancy Chen Long, Wider than the Sky 

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MY LATEST PUBLICATIONS:

I was a finalist in The Women Artists Ekphrastic Contest held by THE EKPHRASTIC REVIEW. My poem was inspired by Rosa Bonheur’s painting titled “Changing Pastures,” 1863.  








Changing Pastures, Rosa Bonheur, 1863 

Cool early summer afternoon on the channel, brisk wind not ideal for keeping a flock of thirty calm in a rocking boat. Between bleats of packed lambs and cries of kittiwakes nesting on chalky cliffs, my ears throb. The stink of sour ale wafts from the rowing mate, mixed with the gamy musk of hot, wet wool coats, queasies my stomach. 

I take shallow breaths, concentrate on sun silvering blue-green water in the distance, not the sharp peaks of dizzying waves alongside us. Iridescent moss mantles the valleys. I imagine the crimson clover, ox-eye daisy, and buttercup I saw when last visiting with my love, Elise. 

The sun soothes my arms, back, neck, matches the warmth of the ewe’s rhythmic heave against my shins. 

My arms ease into the cadence of tandem oaring. The white-haired sheepherder at the bow launches into a rousing sea shanty about a drunken sailor. My oarsman groans. When I inhale to join the song, I taste the water’s whiff—elemental, briny-sweet, wild.

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The following four poems were published in WRITING IN A WOMAN’S VOICE:  The Call by Remedios Varo, 1961, Fledgling, Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait with Necklace of Thorns and Hummingbird, 1940, & Georgia O'Keeffe's It Was Red and Pink, 1959. The poems inspired by artwork have a link below that will show you that particular work of art. 

My flash fiction was a finalist in the 2021 Hemingway Shorts Contest, held annually by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. It was published in the literary journal, Hemingway Shorts Volume 6.