Karen Kevorkian

Karen Kevorkian’s poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines including Antioch Review, Fiction International, 5 Fingers Review, Hambone, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, Rio Grande Review, River City Review, Third Coast, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She teaches poetry and fiction writing at the University of Virginia.


All Books

Black text stating White Stucco Black Wing poems by Karen Kevorkian over a light grey background with the centered image of tree shadows.

White Stucco Black Wing

Karen Kevorkian

Publication Date: March 1, 2004

$12.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 1-888996-78-1

Description:

OUT OF PRINT


Contact marketing@redhen.org


“In the poems of White Stucco Black Wing, Karen Kevorkian offers a meditation on the body as at once our source of knowing and our record of “what passes and passes/away” that world that we’re necessarily always leaving, making it all the more imperative that we look closely. These poems give refreshing witness to that imperative.” — Carl Phillips


“Through the white heat of language, a painterly imagination, and headlong into a story hinted at unread, these poems strike at the very heart of being. Karen Kevorkian takes us to that rare and ravishing place in poetry, to look at the thing and in the looking become. This is one wonderful book, as full of life as life is.”—Gillian Conoley


“Karen Kevorkian’s poems are hip enough to understand that in a white and black world there is only unfinished understanding. Only unfinished business, so to speak, and therein their human condition is pure presence”—Ralph Angel

News

SUBDUCTION author featured in The Rumpus!

In these disunited states, containing within them many sovereign nations, we are in what Biodun Jeyifo called “arrested decolonization.” And yet, as Mukoma Wa Ngugi wrote, “The work of decolonization […]

Kristen Millares Young article in The Rumpus!

As editor of SEISMIC:Seattle, City of Literature, I asked artists and storytellers to reflect on what it means for Seattle to be a City of Literature. While celebrating Seattle’s inclusion in […]

Subduction recommended by High Country News!

One of the books I read this year and loved (and keep recommending!) is Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction, set on the Makah Reservation in Neah Bay, Washington. The story follows two […]

A Message to the City from Kristen Millares Young

Good morning. It’s Friday, August 7, and we’re ending the week with something special: a message from the novelist and journalist Kristen Millares Young, followed by a visual poem that is an excerpt […]

The Rumpus: Outsiders Looking In

I met Kristen Millares Young at AWP’s annual writing conference earlier this year. I sidled up, thrust my advance copy of Subduction in front of her to sign, and she said, “It’s […]

HipLatina: 15 Latinx Summer Reads to Beat the Boredom

Subduction topped the New Release in Hispanic American Literature Amazon Kindle chart, so you know it’s a good read for summer.  Kristen Millares Young’s book follows Claudia, a Latina anthropologist who […]

The Long Fight to Decolonize Book Research

Kristen Millares Young on Learning from Makah Tradition I am zipped into a tent on my friend’s beachfront lawn. Caring for her mom and kids, she has a full house, […]

April 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us

Ms. Magazine Ms. Feminist Know-It-All features Subduction! In this utterly unique and important first novel, Young examines themes of love, intrusion, loss, community and trust against a backdrop of a […]

On Diaspora, Encounter, and Emotional Restitution

There are a lot of moving, shifting pieces that comprise Kristen Millares Young’s stunning debut novel, Subduction; its characters are equal parts voyeurs and participants in their own unraveling, and the Pacific […]

Reviews

Thanks for the shoutout World Wide Work!

UNDER NUSHAGAK BLUFF by Mia C. Heavener, SUBDUCTION by Kristen Millares Young, and SUMMER OF THE CICADAS by Chelsea Catherine were all featured on the newsletter World Wide Work: Books, […]

Past as Place in Subduction

In Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction, one of the main characters, Peter, a member of the Makah tribe, talks about the past as a physical place that can hold you. In the […]

Rain Taxi: Subduction reviewed by Douglas Cole

Subduction is most of all a story of displacement and dislocation: for Claudia, whose Latina heritage lies over a border and whose sense of family lies beyond the betrayal that […]

Library Journal reviews Subduction

VERDICT Gorgeously, toughly written, this book dares to be open-ended yet leaves readers with a satisfying sense of how life really unfolds. Cultural clash matters here, but personal differences and […]

The Paris Review: Staff Picks Subduction

Kristen Millares Young’s debut novel Subduction takes as its subject a subtle clash of culture in the Pacific Northwest. The novel’s protagonist, Claudia, is an anthropologist fleeing the remains of her marriage […]