A few years ago, Karen Donovan started collecting rocks from a “secret little beach” in her Rhode Island neighborhood and began storing them on her basement’s shelves. “I picked them up because they were beautiful,” she writes, “and then I started wondering how they were made. That’s when things got real.” Getting real in this case resulted in a hybrid text demonstrating how the inanimate can lay monumental claims upon the animate, claims made visible through Donovan’s exploration of the geological as the material foundation on which ecological and human systems are built. The combination of rock photos and poems provides a unique means of lifting off from the literal and then bringing us back down to the ethics of managing meaning for the everyday. The interplay between rocks and language underscores Donovan’s ongoing fascination with irreconcilable opposites – consider her contemplation of beauty vs. brutality in “Musical Sand” – and suggests an artist’s ethical obligation to get real by acknowledging both. Her playful, richly textured narrative and tonal shifts interweave existential dread and consolation; the heft of this project, its combination of materiality as rock and materiality as language, is notable for the ways it contemplates in/stability and challenges us to locate, at least temporarily, a possible “safe place on which to stand.” Wet Cement Press will publish two full-length editions of Donovan’s rock poems, Letters to Boulders, one in hard cover, one in paperback, both with color photos, forthcoming in October 2025.
Karen Donovan’s latest collection of poems, Monad+Monadnock, was published by Wet Cement Press. Her book Planet Parable (Etruscan Press) appears in the innovative multi-author volume Trio along with complete books by the poets Diane Raptosh and Daneen Wardrop. Her other books of poems are Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky / Editor’s Choice Award, and Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press), which won the Juniper Prize. She is also the author of Aard-vark to Axolotl (Etruscan Press), a collection of tiny stories and essays illustrated with engravings from a vintage Webster’s dictionary. She has new work in the 2022 anthology Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. From 1985 to 2005 she co-edited ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a print journal of very short prose. She lives in Rhode Island, way too close to the water.