Placed: Karesansui Poems

Carol Snow

Jan 2008 · Counterpath Press

About this ebook

Poetry. PLACED: KARESANSUI POEMS is a poetic sequence that juxtaposes words, phrases, quotes, and lyric excerpts in the manner of stones in a Japanese dry-landscape Zen garden: karesansui. "Subtexts" identify sources of quotations, ranging from Matsuo Bash-o to the Marx Brothers. Time is stilled here, each one- or two-line poem, for rather than about insight, is both brief and durable, inviting the reader to explore and reconsider a complex of associations.

About the author

A native New Yorker, Kevin Kopelson attended both Bronx High School of Science and The Juilliard School. He majored in music at Yale (graduating at age nineteen) and then got a law degree from Columbia (at twenty-two). After practicing law, he got a doctorate in English Literature from Brown (at thirty-one). Much to his surprise, he’s been in Iowa ever since—teaching “critical theory” at a university there and also, unlike some even older colleagues, writing books (Love’s Litany [1994], Beethoven’s Kiss [1996], The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky [1997], Neatness Counts [2004], and Sedaris [2007]). Much to his surprise, he’s now fifty-two. - See more at: http://counterpathpress.org/confessions-of-a-plagiaristkevin-kopelson#sthash.CoQ1CcwH.dpuf

Carol Snow is the author of ARTIST & MODEL (selected by Robert Hass for the National Poetry Series and winner of the Poetry Center Book Award), FOR, and THE SEVENTY PREPOSITIONS (both published by the University of California Press). She has received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature, a Poetry Fund grant, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.