From the Belly: poets
respond to Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons
“What a great idea! Amazing how suggestive Stein’s TB are! It is regularly claimed that these poems are charming “nonsense” and don’t mean anything. You and your contributors show they certainly do ‘mean’ in wonderful ways…” Marjorie Perloff, author of Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics
how we hold on
What are the things we hold on to, we cling to, we store in the compartment of the heart?
Here find baby talk about the McCarthy hearings as a child watches tv with her dad, the life and death matters on the cliffs of Negril, the sassy girl talk, the politics of who to resurrect…or not.
The Anima of Paul Bowles
Many have tried to explain the gravitational pull that kept Paul Bowles and his wife Jane Auer in their peculiar orbit. How did that work? Karren Alenier reminds us that all love is as truly incomprehensible as it is powerful. She inhabits these astonishing talents, and makes of their lives a sparkling abstract galaxy of words. Richard Peabody, editor, Gargoyle Magazine
Looking for Divine Transportation
winner, 2002 Towson University Prize for Literature
“The world is my neighborhood.” With these words Alenier perfectly describes Looking for Divine Transportation. Her witty poems, populated with people telling their stories: Grandma Etta and Grandpa Sol; Abraham and Isaac; Adam and Eve; Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; and the poet/traveler, herself, journey to Eden, Baltimore, Casablanca, Paris, the deep south. …the vehicles of this transport aren’t planes or trains—but words—which spring from a divine, God-inspired, profound, passionate place—Alenier’s imagination. Jane Shore, author of Music Minus One
