The Poetry of Karla Huston
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Karla Huston is the author of five chapbooks of poetry:  A Halo of Watchful Eyes (Wolf Angel Press 1997), Pencil Test (Cassandra Press 2002), Flight Patterns (Main Street Rag Press 2003), and Virgins on the Rocks (Parallel Press 2004), and Catch and Release (Marsh River Editions).  Winner of many writing awards, including the Main Street Rag Chapbook contest, she has published poetry, reviews and interviews in several journals including Cimarron Review, 5 A.M., Free Verse, Margie, North American Review, One Trick Pony, Pearl, Rattle and online www.smartishpace.com.

Karla's Poetry Index

Theory of Salt
Spiritual Warfare
Safe Water
Anti-Rapunzel
Mona Lisa Imagines
What She'll Do For Love
Windows
Whistling Mother
Nightmare
Morning Zephyr
How I Got Lipstick On Pages 17, 18, And 19 Of The Book I Planned to Give You
It's Foolish

Reviews:

"There is no situation too absurd or trivial that Huston is unable to invest with a humour strangely filled with gravitas, not even her forgetting what she wanted to write as she attempted to begin a poem. Like Margaret Atwood, Ms Huston is a poetess of confidence – the power in her writing comes not so much from her subjects, which are wondrously diverse, than from the fact that she writes." Zhuang Yisa: Quarterly Literary Review Singapore: July 4, 2006.

Always clear, always perfectly organized, the poems play like small bits of conversation with an educated, talented person who notices the details of life in an engaging manner. There are small explosions of language throughout the poems. "I want to learn the stories/of their small bodies," she says of spiders. A group of old women are imagined as being once young and alluring, but now "betrayed by their own skin." Henry Berne: Babel Magazine: Online

"Often feisty, funny and always steeped in emotional truth, this chapbook is to be savored and returned to again and again. With an almost joyful sense of agony, it makes us remember all the selves we were and might yet be." Andrea Potos

"Huston is a poetic talent to watch, and has succeeded in creating a lively collection that will surely keep readers laughing from one poem to the next. Quite an achievement, and one worthy of high praise." Laura Stamps

"There are certain poets whose work I keep beside my bed -- for inspiration, solace, and instruction in how to live. Karla Huston is one of these. No one else I know writes as well or as thrillingly about what it means to be alive in a woman's body (specifically a middle-aged woman's body), or what it feels like to remember in that woman's body. In this stunning new collection, Huston takes her earlier investigations of memory, desire, and the sweet, daily details of life even further in praise-songs of yearning and discovery. Daring, self-aware, and wise, these poems speak with great authority and are unafraid to "praise great and dangerous things." Huston is poet who "unzip[s]" us "down to the skin," revealing the "riches hidden in some dark, sparkling place." Lucid, unsentimental, sensual, and breathtakingly lyrical, these poems cast sparks that set the page afire, illuminating past and present, innocence and experience, the life of the body and the life of the imagination with unparalleled candor and insight. It's quite simply one of the best books I've read this year." Alison Townsend



© 2006 Karla Huston
All rights reserved.