Keeping Bright Company - Guest Review by Karen Lee Lewis

NB: Reading poetry is as much about how it makes you feel as it is about the meaning of the words. Sometimes, the emotion is even more important than the definitions. This review embraces that stance; it's something I hope more readers can learn to embrace. - JT

BOA Editions (2010)

Keetje Kuipers' book of poetry, Beautiful inthe Mouth, is sculpted with various bodies in mind. She has pressed them for us like flowers into her book. She grounds the work in a tangible physicality, giving the reader many different hands to hold throughout. Kuipers begins and ends with the body, and is particularly interested in its placement in the world. Her eyes paint the concrete with just enough abstraction to create layered landscapes that transform and surprise. The collection, set out in five sections, is a trail guide to light and shadow, and she pinpoints it where ever possible inside the poems, inside lit cigarettes and lamplights, inside fading paper roses and the hulls of boats. We follow the speaker as she attempts to locate a place where the light never sleeps inside her, a place where she can keep bright company, where she feels at once both alone and held together by a body that is not her own.

Submission Guidelines for Spring Residency - Karen Lee Lewis

NB: In order to promote Architrave poems and poets, this blog will release both poet bios and my comments on their poems into the wild. Enjoy~

Read the full text of the poem by clicking the image or purchase it here. 

About the poem:
Writers and artists will smile at how this poem inserts the lexicon of bird habitat conservation into the standard call for residency applications. That kind of cross-pollination is something that poetry does well, as is the list format. But the poem's appeal is much more broad; anyone who has ever searched for an apartment or a job will empathize with the task ahead of the Kirtland Warbler - there is always so much to consider, so many hoops to jump through! Lewis is obviously enjoying poking fun at overly prescriptive submission guidelines, what with her threat of "evil Shakespearean citations" and request for translations of bird song. But the poet is also quite serious, placing at the end, where it will be what's best remembered, a reminder that the consequence of failure is death. Not just of the individual, but of the entire species. It's strong medicine disguised in a huge, humorous spoonful of sugar. 


About the Poet:
Karen Lee Lewis is an independent Teaching Artist, and a Teacher Consultant for the Western New York Writing Project. She teaches creative writing for non-profit organizations and art galleries throughout Western New York. Her "Picturing Poetry Project" with Amy Luraschi, was the subject of a documentary film by Jon Hand, and was aired on PBS. Karen is a fellow of Canada's Banff Centre's Wired Writing Studio. Her poetry, short fiction, features, and photography have been widely published, recently in Red River Review, Nomad, Stormy Weather, the Nature Conservancy's newsletter Nature, Buffalo Spree and Teachers & Writers magazine. Karen won Honorable Mention in the 2010 Aurora Artisan's Wordsworth poetry contest. Her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Slipstream Press. Editorial work for Traffic East magazine is archived at www.trafficeast.com. Her full-length poetry collection, What I Would Not Unravel (Writers Den Books), is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.