The Banjo Clock: Volume 34 (New California Poetry) - Softcover

"Karen Garthe writes some of the most expert-and tightly-wound-lyric poems you'll ever read... If discussions of the sort Karen Garthe is performing in The Banjo Clock ... don't really interest you, that's okay: Just stop reading poetry right now, pick up your favorite beach novella, and forget the world's oldest form of literary currency still exists in any appreciable volume... What Garthe is offering today's poetry readers is a reason to read poetry rather than prose." -- Seth Abramson Huffington Post

For Karen Garthe, poetry is a Molotov cocktail. A master of radical invention, Garthe combines brio of conception with linguistic virtuosity, bringing language to new life from the inside at breakneck speed. "The Banjo Clock", her second collection, cultivates a luxuriant sensibility even as it interrupts poetic continuity with cuts, ironies, sharp wit, and wild recklessness. In poems that consider poetry itself, Garthe writes about preparing the medium, the ink, "the motion of new utility". She then turns to America's psychic maladies and the need to rehabilitate our democracy, now floundering in the glare of TV's blue depressive light.