Karen Annesen

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Biographical note:  Karen Annesen grew up on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, then moved to the UK after completing a first degree in Psychology. Work with homeless women and vulnerable adults has taken her from Oxford to Cardiff then London and now back to Oxford. While in London she was also a tutor in Creative Writing for the City Lit in London. She has an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Glamorgan and an MSc in Housing Policy from Oxford Brookes University.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714339
ISBN:  9781844714339
Author:  Karen Annesen
Title:  How to Fall
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jul-09
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  How to Fall, from Cape Cod to Cornwall, is the art of defying the gravity of loss. Chance encounters hint at the darker side of relationships. The present carries with it the weight of the unspoken past. And throughout these urgent narratives there is a voice you can trust, and a world wide and generous enough for starting again. Here are sensuous poems that celebrate the transience of the moment.

Main description:  How to Fall, from Cape Cod to Cornwall, is the art of defying the gravity of loss. Chance encounters hint at the darker side of relationships. The present carries with it the weight of the unspoken past. And throughout these urgent narratives there is a voice you can trust, and a world wide and generous enough for starting again. Here are sensuous poems that celebrate the transience of the moment.

“Karen Annesen’s How to Fall is going to be a real event. Annesen is one of those poets whose cumulative effect is greater than that of any individual poem. There’s a stillness and intensity about her language that reminds me of Louise Gluck, which from a rabid Gluck fangirl is high praise, and I love the way some of her poems clearly have an immense back-story which is never spelt out but adds ominous heft and depth to what we do see.” —Sheenagh Pugh

Table of contents:
How to Fall
10.45 to Stockholm
Wishing
Fishmonger’s Cafe
Bridesmaid
The Dunes
Playground
Carl’s Bar and Grill
Getting On
Via London
Late Night Window
A Boy Can Dream of Honey Only If He’s Tasted It
Inside This Room
Every Dark Place
A Few Words
Cornmarket Street, Oxford
Fair Promises
Unsteady
At the Inn-Between
Dwyfor
Letter from Lasswade
Altered
Afternoon, Rhodes
Telling the Story
Letter to Nate
Domestic Fire
Stirring
As if She Thought
Imagining Falmouth
She Eats Cherries Slowly
Dinas Terrace
Eating a Mango with My Mother
Core
Catherine Wheel
River Mouth
More Invisible Still
Into the Woods
Waverly Station
Coniston Water
Building the House
Her Blue Room
Bridge
Don’t be Mad
An Error of Timing
Newport Parrog
Widow
In the Bedroom
Frozen
Bakerloo Line
Paddington Station
Christ Church Meadow
Gift
First
St Martin’s Island
Here, Now
Visit
San Xavier Mission
Filling Mia
Blakeney, Norfolk
Driving Cornwall
Time to Go Now

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Excerpt from book:  

Domestic Fire

Smoke came into the dream,
the one he has each night
where hunger makes him eat himself.
Father laughing.

He woke wondering about the smoke,
then smelled it in his room.
He grabbed the photo of his mother
in the pewter frame, then ran.

Outside, the sound of fire engines braking
and neighbours screaming.
Three houses on fire.
Officers shouting to him: Who’s in the house?

It’s empty, he hears himself say,
The house has been empty for years.

Unpublished endorsement:  Karen Annesen’s poems do not, usually, tell the whole story; they tell part of a story and leave the reader vaguely disturbed by the implied back-story and consumed with interest in it. The reality of these poems is not the surface reality of fact and anecdote, which is the stuff of so many poems. Rather it is the deeper reality of imagery and the senses. They go beyond the merely observational, for they observe not just what people say and do, but what is actually in their minds when they say and do it. In their refusal to provide easy answers they are tantalising and disturbing, yet their skill with language and imagery is deeply satisfying.

Sheenagh Pugh

Unpublished endorsement:  Karen Annesen’s poems are extraordinarily observant. They have a steady-eyed, lightly carried humanity which presents things as they are but also transfigures them by a lucid, precise poetic technique. Her gift is to make profound feeling look artless, whether she is evoking unlaboured mourning, or love, or parting. The poems make their point at once, like a Raymond Carver story; but then you find yourself haunted by them. She is a poet of the very first order.

Bernard O’Donoghue