Karen Holmberg writes poems, essays, and fiction strongly anchored in a love of the natural world.
Winner of the 2025 Cider Press Review Editor’s Prize Book Award
ISBN: 9781930781696
Pub date: August 17, 2026
Advance praise for Reckless Shelter:
“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 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
"Had I encountered this book when I was a young, insatiable reader, I’m certain it would have been one of my favorites, but even now I find myself hopelessly in love with its indelible imagery and delectable characters. Holmberg’s alchemy of words invites you to get lost in this story and never want to leave. 'There are many Beyonds,' indeed, and you will not forget The Collagist or its meaningful mysteries."
—Diane Wald, author of My Famous Brain and The Bayrose Files
"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. Romilly's deepest longing is to bridge the chasm that separates her from her grief-stricken father, a chasm that emerged in the wake of her mother's passing. However, when her uncle mysteriously vanishes, and the sky splits open to reveal a being from the Beyond, Romilly embarks on a quest to unearth the hidden truths within her world.
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
