Amytis Leaves Her Garden - Paperback

by Karen Kelsay (Author)

Amytis Leaves Her Garden is a lovely, lyrical collection. I particularly admire the musicality of your indvidual lines. You write with an admirable density. comments from Dana GioiaKaren Kelsay's distinct poetic voice descends not from the modernists, but from the 19th-century "poetess" tradition that is being rediscovered by feminist scholars. Kelsay is the editor of Victorian Violet Press poetry journal, and like flowers pressed within the pages of a Victorian album, her poems translate memorable experiences into compressed visual images, and vice versa. Lush passages of description and hard-earned lines of wisdom lodge in the reader's mind.
Julie Kane, Poet Laureate of Louisiana 2012
Studying this collection, "Amytis Leaves Her Garden," I am captivated most by author Karen Kelsay's confidence in her audience. Hers is a verse to respect the reader at every turn - beauty without blind, trap, or land-mine, as secure in itself as it is in its reader. "I read my thoughts on some far distant night..." she writes in the poem 'Quiet Flame' - an apt epithet for the collection - "...green willow trees with soft Parisian light." And, seated in her audience, I feel as though not only is that light my own possession, but -"far and distant" - the thought, as well.
Jennifer Reeser

Author Biography

Karen Kelsay, native of Orange County, has been widely published over the past five years in poetry journals and anthologies. She is the Editor of Aldrich Press, and Alabaster Leaves Publishing, two small presses that publish mid-career poets. Her poetry has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She recently received the Fluvanna Prize (2012) from The Lyric (the oldest magazine in North America in continuous publication devoted to traditional poetry), and has been featured in The New Formalist and spotlighted in The Hypertexts. She was recently interviewed at The Poet's Corner with Russell Bittner, and at A Motley Vision (an award winning blog devoted to exploring Mormon literature, criticism, publishing and marketing - plus film, theater, art, mu-sic, and pop and folk culture). Five of her poems have been included in the anthology: Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets, which is comprised of eighty published Mormon poets from the past two decades-the first book of its kind in twenty years. Her most recent full length book, Dove on a Church Bench (Punkin House Press 2011), was followed by Lavender Song (Fortunate Childe Publications 2011). She is the Editor of the online poetry and art journal, Victorian Violet Press, and lives in Torrance, California.