Metropolis Burning (Imagination) (Imagination) (Imagination) [Paperback]

Karen Kovacik (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In these lush and wry poems, Karen Kovacik returns to a city that burns in her imagination and ancestry, as she explores the once-gracious metropolis of Warsaw: its churches filled with 'evangelists of shrapnel and of wax'; its architects designing modernist 'radiant flat world[s]' on their computer screens while living in dilapidated, centrally planned apartments 'reeking of garbage'; its poets turning prematurely gray as they 'kiss...in every dialect/of tobacco.' Warsaw is 'a coal on [her] tongue,' as she feels charged witht he prophet's urgency to speak its name, and the names of other cities, in the voices of alternate selves, including the woman she might have been had her grandfather not emigrated from Silesia. With affection and irony, Kovacik makes her return, not only to a literal Poland in the last days of Soviet domination, but to the psychic landscape immersed and implicated in layers of history and conjugated in the ancestral mother tongue. Here, she blends the language of Eros with that of Realpolitik, in a collection of poetic love notes in which 'all armaments have crossed the frontiers.'" --Carolyne Wright

"The beloved and ruined cities of Karen Kovacik's Metropolis Burning are the substance of an individual and human history of the last century. In Warsaw, Krakow, and its near-neighbor Auschwitz; in Dresden, Prague, New Orleans, Belgrade, and Cleveland, she finds 'Poetic justice: when image fits idea like a workboot.' Out of her generous heart, her strict understanding of the crimp of labor on the free imagination, and her rare sense of humor, Karen Kovacik has made a gorgeous, multi-layered music I want to listen to again and again and again." --Maggie Anderson

About the Author

Karen Kovacik is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She is the recipient of a number of awards, including a guest fellowship at the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Creative Writing, an Arts Council of Indianapolis Creative Renewal Fellowship, and a Fulbright Research Grant to Poland. Her poems and stories have appeared in many journals, and her translations of contemporary Polish poetry can be found in The Lyric, American Poetry Review, West Branch, and Poetry East . She is also the author of Beyond the Velvet Curtain, winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 1999).

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Cleveland State U Poetry Center (July 8, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1880834669
• ISBN-13: 978-1880834664
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,409,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Metropolis Burning with a Poet's Love, September 27, 2010

By 

John Guzlowski (Danville, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Metropolis Burning (Imagination) (Imagination) (Imagination) (Paperback)

I love the poems in this book.

In it, Karen Kovacik does almost the impossible. She writes about the tragic 20th-century history of Poland with a firm awareness of what happened in Warsaw and Auschwitz but she also manages to infuse the Polish landscape of lost lives and lost battles with a love for Poland and an excitement in writing about it that is infectious. And in doing so she gets at -- for me -- the very heart of Poland.

One of my favorite poems in the book is "Versions of Irena" about her aunt who grew up near Auschwitz. Here's a piece of that poem:

1943

She could smell them burning, their forgotten
valises piled in a corner of the yard
along with topcoats and short pants, sheet music,
a book of French pictures. She hid the brittle pages
in her coat and learned what a man's body
could do to a woman's. Midnight was the hour
of gravity, when the sergeant swung the bell
on his table. He wanted his heart's delight:
something milky to help him sleep, warmed cognac
to dull his dreams. Each night, she smelled them burning.