Karen Volkman’s award-winning collection Spar has as its central form a highly compressed, musical variant of the prose poem. Volkman develops a new lyric density that marries the immediacy of image-centered poetry to the rhythmic resources of prose. Her first poem begins, “Someone was searching for a Form of Fire,” and this wild urge to seek form—and thus definition—in the most uncontainable of elements propels the book forward; each poem maps the mind’s evolving positions in response to its variable and perilous encounters. Sometimes the encounter is romantic or purely carnal, a sensual landscape of human relations. At other times, nature itself has an almost humanly emotional connection to the speaker. While very much a living voice, the poems’ speaker is not a consistent self but a mutable figure buffeted by tenderness, terror, irony, or lust into elaborate evasions, exclamations, verbal hijinks, and lyric flights. As its title suggests, Spar embodies both resistance and aspiration, while its epigraphs further emphasize the simultaneous allure and danger of the unknown within the sensual and material worlds and in the mind itself.

Karen Volkman's first book, Crash's Law, was chosen for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, New Republic, Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, and Fence. She is currently poet-in-residence at the University of Chicago.

“Volkman convincingly melds her engagement with the ludic quality of words with the marvelously chatoic commerce of the natural world ...these poems are involved, elusive and often startling performance.”—Publishers Weekly, April 29, 2002

 “Karen Volkman excels in a lyrical torque so polished, it borders on obsessive-compulsive ... Her poems are the best of contradictions, coupling tradition with today's sardonic uncertainty.”—Cathy Hong for Voice Literary Supplement Spring 2002