A grandmother’s jewelry. A heavy rainfall. The fruit in a pina colada. A soccer game. Accompanying a parent to a medical procedure. Waiting for biopsy results. A can opener. Grief. Riding in the car with your sister. Gardening. A frog. Cicadas. Arthritis. The neighbor who calls you by the wrong name.
What all these disparate things have in common is that they’re familiar. common, everyday. They’re so familiar that we often forget them or overlook them.
In the hands of poet Jen Karetnick, however, the familiar and the common become something else. She reaches into her own childhood. She considers the experiences of her own children. She looks at the life she’s living now. The subjects are largely what we know as experiences common to all of us, but Karetnick shows us how the familiar will also indicate something deeper, something more profound. That’s the heart and soul of her new collection, Organ Language.
Some Tuesday Readings
Night jar – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.
Planted – poem by L.L. Barkat at Every Day Poems.
“You, Andrw Marvell,” poem by Archibald MacLeish – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.
Poetry Club Tea Date: The Pershing Hotel – Tweetspeak Poetry.
Do You Hear Birds? – poem by Elizabeth Wickland at Rabbit Room Poetry.
