Ph.D., University of Denver; MFA, University of Iowa

Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary, Karla Kelsey's first book, was selected by Carolyn Forché to win the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and was published by Ahshata Press in 2006. Her second manuscript, Iteration Nets, will appear from Ahsahta in 2010, and a chapbook of poetry, Iterations, is forthcoming from Pilot Press. Karla's poetry and essays on poetry have recently appeared in such magazines as the New Review of Literature, the Boston Review, Octopus, Slope, Five Fingers Review and Fence. She has recently started book arts press specializing in poetry, prose, cross-genre and visual collaborations. Karla holds the Winifred and Gustave Weber Professorship in the Humanities and teaches courses in poetry and editing and publishing.

E-mail Karla Kelsey

Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary

This book of poetry takes flight from Plato's Theaetetus, in which Socrates tells us that the mind works as an aviary—particles of knowledge fly around like birds, and the thinker plucks them down to use when he or she sees fit. The bird becomes a metaphor for the action of the mind folding and unfolding into explosions and navigational patterns of flight. Lyrical and thought-provoking, it is a masterful debut.

"Kelsey writes what it is to know, of what we become/ when the universe is seen in lights of its generation.... What Kelsey has given us in lyric form: another world, wherein the reader may enter and become awake."
--Carolyn Forché

Little Dividing Doors in the Mind

"When Karla Kelsey refers to 'curio cabinets,' she, and the poem, are fully aware of the originary Latin 'curiosus,' 'full of care or pains,' which applies fully to this book, exquisite with detail and implication both: it is a collection of threatening energies controlled by a single voice, a voice both pained and pains taking."
--Bin Ramke