The Afterlife is a Dry County by Charmi Keranen
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Charmi Keranen holds a BA in English from Indiana University South Bend. Her poetry has appeared in Passages North, The Salt River Review, JMWW, Stirring, blossombones, elimae, The Dirty Napkin, Ouroboros Review, Sugar House Review, Inter|rupture, Grasslimb Journal and Hot Metal Bridge. She and her husband live in Northern Indiana, where she works as a freelance writer and proofreader of court transcripts.
Praise for The Afterlife is a Dry County
“What a subtle but bracing joy Charmi Keranen’s The Afterlife is a Dry County is. In poems such as “The South Shore,” transcendence emerges out of some paradoxically laid back determination to limn new realities using the particulars of place and mind in order to articulate a unique musicality, a powerful metaphor for the self. Which is to say the poems are sensual, deeply imagined, and visceral. They’re also historical, metaphysical, and funny as hell. But Keranen’s book is also a package full of things, constructions simultaneously so wholly “graspable” and disjunctive it feels as if a bell has been rung in the reader’s consciousness as he drifts toward the wide open water inside the wake of each poem’s lingering and mysterious shadow. One’s not sure HOW she pulls so many disparate elements together in such a small space of page and to such startling effect, but it is a pleasure to read, and I know I am richer for it.”
–David Dodd Lee, author of The Nervous Filaments, Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere: The Ashbery Erasure Poems, and Orphan, Indiana.
“In The Afterlife is a Dry County, the world undergoes multiple transformations and evolutions. “It’s slow going//waiting for the rock/to become a fish,” Keranen writes. All the living things that appear here—hummingbirds, centipedes, owls, spiders, deer flies, egrets—exist next to man’s language, also alive and morphing. It’s as if time, too, has compressed her poetic line, and we read this collection, with all its white space—its absence—acutely aware of the “weight of language.”"
– Nancy Botkin, author of Parts That Were Once Whole and Bent Elbow and Distance
Coming Soon:
Landscaping for Wildlife by Jen Karetnick
“Jen Karetnick’s eloquent Landscape for Wildlife reconnects us to the natural world with a lyrical intelligence and beauty that is at once revelatory, empathetic, personal and political. These rich, inventive poems bind contemporary physical and emotional landscapes through a masterful and meticulous command of the range of ancient and modern poetic forms, which makes them timeless. And unforgettable. ”
–Diane Goodman, author of the newly released Party Girls (Autumn House Press) and The Plated Heart and The Genius of Hunger (Carnegie Mellon University Press).
Jen Karetnik
With the publication of Landscaping for Wildlife, Jen Karetnick is the author or editor of seven books, including two additional chapbooks of poetry: Necessary Salt (Pudding House Publications, 2007) and Bud Break at Mango House (Portlandia Group, 2008), which won the Portlandia Press Award in 2008. Her eighth book, the Tigertail Anthology “Pairings,” will be published in 2012, and her ninth, a cookbook called Romancing the Mango: Recipes for the Obsessed, is forthcoming from University Press of Florida in 2013. Her poetry, prose, drama, articles and essays have been published widely in journals and magazines including Carpe Articulum, Cimarron Review, Gastronomica, Miami Herald, North American Review, Poets & Writers, River Styx, Southern Living and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She works as the Creative Writing Director at Miami Arts Charter School; the restaurant critic for MIAMI Magazine; and a columnist for Biscayne Times. Jen lives on the last acre of a historic mango plantation in Miami with her husband, two children, three dogs, four cats and fifteen mango trees.