Karla Kelsey, Ph.D.
Publications
Karla is the author of Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary, which was selected by Carolyn Forche for the 2005 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. It was published in 2006 by Ahsahta Press. Her second full-length book, Iteration Nets, has just been released from Ahsahta Press. Work from this book can be found in journals such as jubilat, Denver Quarterly, the New Review of Literature, and Bird Dog. In addition, poems from this manuscript are included in the anthology Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry. Little Dividing Doors in the Mind, a chapbook, was published by Noemi Press in 2005. Her most recent chapbook, 3 Movements was published by 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 is currently the editor of and contributor to Fence Books' Constant Critic book review website. She teaches courses in poetry and editing and publishing. Karla has been awarded a Fulbright to teach in Budapest during the spring 2011 semester.
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Iteration Nets |
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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." |
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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." |
