Karen Volkman’s first book, Crash’s Law , was a National Poetry Series selection, published by W.W. Norton in 1996. Her second book, Spar , received the Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2002 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry , The Pushcart Prize Anthology , and The Norton Introduction to Poetry . From “Brown is the flat”: Brown is the flat gestation of a maze,grass-grown remembrance of a second lookthe field holds open like a nascent bookin which the wind has written, Sudden strays,sudden numbers beat—the roots of daysbranched intangibles a stupor tookand slept and stroked and scattered in a shookhaze of wakenings, refracting raysoutleaping their seasons, daughters of a glanceago—ahead, a retrograde advance.
