Warren by Karina van Berkum

Praise for Warren "In this collection, van Berkum deftly recalls the muddle of childhood and recaptures an awakening to life in the world. Flowers and puddles, crows and bison are transfigured into emblems of desire and give way to a plain-spoken queer love in a sequence of poems that record deep, irredeemable loss. The poet writes with an urgency, lines that sprawl or shrink as if she is trying to map a retreating horizon. In one poem, van Berkum says about a windmill that she “… cried for it to be what it seemed.” The whole book aches with this crying out. It invites the reader to attend to the interstices between our lives and our experience of the world, reminding us that the earth is alive with magic, that the most powerful witchcraft might still be love."D Eric Parkison, author of No ArcadiaKarina van Berkum’s Warren is a festival of wisdom and pleasure, qualities captured in poems both beautifully felt and rendered. A love of life permeates even the darkest poems, and these brig