Here In My Body It Feels Crowded: Poems by Karen Kevorkian

“Packed with fleeting visual details, the poems in Karen Kevorkian’s deeply original Here in My Body it Feels Crowded feel at once intimate and observed from an eerie distance. Kevorkian skillfully places each image and gesture with both utter precision and the clearest eyes —in this way the poems enact small disarming worlds, entirely idiosyncratic, language stretching and collapsing on itself, self-inflicted compound words—pleasurably ungoverned sentences we let drift over us like clouds and accept as being made of the stuff of our very own world, if slant. Kevorkian reminds us, powerfully so, that the meaning of our lives—their poignancy and lushness, their arc of time, is built from noticing, and noticing is an art. I can’t remember the last time I read work so familiar yet strange.” 

—Louise Mathias

“At the core of the poems in Here in My Body it Feels Crowded  is a seductive invitation to create and recreate your own universe, ‘where your body led you too young to have imagined anything.’ Precise vocabulary reveals a landscape at the same time solid and fluid, immutable and everchanging, where it is ‘easy to cry velvet the long purple shadows.’ Language may seem segmented, almost clinically severed, although these segments are not pulseless but full of life, rhythm, and emotional charge: ‘You would not know what to say to who you once were.’ Debris is removed so poems flow and build a multifaceted reality, like a hypnotic sequence of movie frames, each line forcing you to keep reading (as if falling) until fully immersed in the images that seem both disconnected and connected: ‘the unwashed body sour/when you leaned in/leafthatched screened porch tinnitus from/insect chatter.’” 

—Mariano Zaro

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Publisher: Walton Well Press
Date Available: March 14, 2025

Length: 36 pages

ISBN 978-1-964295-09-1
Format: 7 by 9.5 inches, full color, paperback
Price: $14.99

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Portrait by Andrei Andreev, Los Angeles

About the Author

KAREN KEVORKIAN is a native of San Antonio who moved to San Francisco but detoured to the east coast before returning to California and working as an editor for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, teaching poetry and fiction writing workshops at UCLA, and before that at the University of Virginia. Here in My Body It Feels Crowded is her fourth poetry collection. Her poems are recently published in New American Writing, Volt, Four Way Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, and many other journals. She has been awarded fellowships from the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, the Ucross Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, MacDowell, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. In Los Angeles she was a board member for seven years of Beyond Baroque literary arts center and is a founding member of the Glass Table Collective, publisher of What Books Press.