Karen Robiscoe

From Concentrate Karen Robiscoe

Come and follow Karen Robiscoe's looping self-referential voice, weaving in and back, and catching the threads up with a punning wit which keeps flashing out and giving surprises, playing with rhyme, cadence, and all the homonyms that may be fit to print. The poems here are sharp and short with a fast dark humor and an eye for irony (as opposed to wrinkly) and irreverent... "love is a compound wound..." and "I will reach for peace and fabric softener sheets." From her a wicked take on Poe in: "Poe-Po' Polly," to the decanters and cruets of dreams of 'Rain-catcher, ' the poignancy of "Violet Rain" surprises in its understated sorrow, regret, and contained panic. Any fellow writer will enjoy "Talking Shop"... the loony fun of "Batter Apart." But she returns to something more haunting with the images in "Projections" as the familiar fall away with time, along with your own belonging in a place-and identity, with it.

-Robin Winter, author of Watch the Shadows, White Whisker Books, 2015

K. E. Robiscoe's From Concentrate is an achievement of the highest order. Virtually every one of Ms. Robiscoe's poetic gems sparkles with wit, humor, melancholy, and awe. Each poem demands and insists upon attention. After a while, the idea of spending an hour ruminating over one that may have taken no more than a minute to read is actually quite thrilling.

-James Buckley; Founder and former Editor / Publisher of Montecito Journal

Karen Robiscoe's poems swirl like gas nebulae or wind-like galaxies on the page. They are concentrates and distillations of the events, encounters, and observations that have enraptured her, and if you sing them to yourself, they will enrapture you. They convey the sensation of elliptical bursts and, sometimes, shoplift your gravity.

-Djelloul Marbrook, author of Suffer the Children, Leaky Boot Press, UK, 2020