RECKLESS SHELTER
ISBN: 9781930781696
August 17, 2026
“Karen Holmberg has long attended to ‘the terror / that lines our hunger for transparency,’ and her attention has never been as unflinching as it is in this collection. Her gaze is increasingly alert, open, tender. It is as if she is listening to the quality of light by which she sees and giving voice to its shaping pressures. In her poetic assemblages, the lusterless and fragile are turned over, reconsidered in shifting luminosities and shadows. Her poems call us to feel ourselves as ‘another cell in the word’s endlessly unbuilding and rebuilding body.’ Reckless Shelter is a supple and bracing meditation on how the invisible world clings to the visible one.”
—Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine
“The gorgeous poems in Karen Holmberg’s Reckless Shelter insist on close looking as a form of care and repair. Without shying from the ‘bruised being’ of our imperiled environment, her eye insists on ‘tilting/ ill to still, old to gold, loss to gloss.’ She links scintillant imagery with sumptuous figurative language to praise the restorative power of friendship, mourn lost elders, and look forward with wary hope as her own daughters come of age. Tender in the attention they bestow on humans, plants, and creatures of all kinds, these poems radiate love for ‘this wonder/ and wounder of a world.’”
—V. Penelope Pelizzon, author of A Gaze Hound that Hunteth by the Eye
“Holmberg’s mother was the inspiration for the poet’s grave attention to nature, a shared gift, ‘mother, daughter, / an octave apart.’ By initiating her own daughters into this matrilineal inheritance, Holmberg reveals the complicated harmonies of her life through poems buoyed by precision, exquisite tenderness, and a penetrating music all her own.”
—Gary Young, author of No Other Life
Sorrow, strangeness, generation, grief and memory, love and violence, memory and despair, and wonder–wonder most of all–meet here in a profusion of sound, sense, and seeing. These are poems in which it’s possible to say, of the iridescent blinking off a butterfly that baffles the observations of a war plane, “Above a wing’s dusk field of melanin, light plies / its octaves.” These are poems in which the Earth insists, “no matter / what land you stand on, you can’t help / but pay yourself back to me.”
—Jonathan Farmer, author of That Peculiar Affirmative: On the Social Life of Poems
If Karen Holmberg’s poems were music, they would be flute song and cellos—that perfect and pure, that deeply felt. Writing about water or daughters, seaweed or wasps, she finds the beautiful chord that transposes love for the present moment into longing for what may never be again. I cherish this book and will hold it close.
—Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Piano Tide, a novel
THE COLLAGIST
ISBN 8791646034369
April 23, 2024
After Romilly's mother's death of a strange fever years ago, neighbors and family fled her village. Bereft, her father becomes increasingly withdrawn, revealing little of the family history that Romilly longs to understand. When her beloved uncle mysteriously disappears from his boat on a cloudless night at sea, she senses her father's growing terror-- a terror she shares when she spies an enormous Being opening a sail-shaped flap of sky over their wheatfield. Romilly suspects these inexplicable events are connected, but how? With the help of unlikely allies-- the healer Arra, Robbie the boisterous crow, and the kestrel Mira-- Romilly must convince her father to dismantle the wall to his greatest secret, and that of the Being that exists in the world beyond.
“Karen Holmberg deftly uses her poetic ability to craft a riveting coming-of-age journey of “closings and openings.” The Collagist will appeal to readers of all ages, and Romilly’s quest for independence and answers to family secrets will resonate with many young people. An absolutely stunning debut.”
— Tara Lynn Masih, author of My Real Name Is Hanna
“The Collagist is a poignant and lyrical story that artfully weaves the intricate path between trauma and healing, illuminating the power of forgiveness with a touch of magic…With intricate metaphors, whimsical magic, and a cast of empathetic characters, author Karen Holmberg deftly guides us through the universally resonant journey of trauma and secrets and the far-reaching anguish that death and loss can inflict upon a family. Above all, Holmberg illuminates the redemptive alchemy of forgiveness, honesty, and love required to mend our deepest hurts.”
— Robyn Dabney, author of The Ascenditure
The Collagist takes us to a timeless place of sea, sky and all the natural beauty in between. Karen Holmberg’s poetic prose deftly navigates the blurry line between reality and the supernatural. Themes of forgiveness and self-discovery resonate, and Romilly’s journey to claim her true self is all our journeys.”
— Betty Culley, author of Three Things I Know Are True and The Name She Gave Me
ISBN 9781886157835
BkMk Press
Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, selected by Lorna Dee Cervantes, Axis Mundi explores how human perception can reveal the elegant within the ordinary as well as in such extraordinary challenges as 9/11 and personal/marital disaster. These poems demonstrate how attentiveness to the world outside the self can restore wholeness. They meditate on the ways that, for all living beings, home is continuously imperiled and yet miraculously endures. The poems together develop a larger theme of equilibrium between the earth, its parts, and the wider universe.
ISBN 9781574410860
University of North Texas Press
Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2000, The Perseids is a book which insists that visual contemplation of the world is an act of the soul. These poems render the rich biological detail of landscape with passion and exactitude and describe the mind's dazzling revelations during moments of shifting perspective and scale.
Read “The Perseids” (title poem) in The Paris Review