WEBVTT

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Karen Brennan is reinventing
the literary landscape.

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She has mastered the craft
and blurs the borders

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of most available genres.

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Brennan is the author of Here
on Earth, a collection of poems,

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Wild Desire and The
Garden In Which I Walk,

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stories, and Being with Rachel,
reflections on dogged cognition

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and darned memory in the form
of a memoir, which was nominated

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for a Pulitzer Prize.

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A new collection of poems,
The Real Enough World,

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is forthcoming from
Wesleyan Press.

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Brennan holds a PhD from
the University of Arizona

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and an MFA from Goddard College.

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She is Professor of English
at the University of Utah,

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a regular faculty member
at the Warren Wilson

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Program for Writers,
and a frequent Tucson

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resident to our good fortune.

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In her fiction, Brennan offers
up the writer's own tools

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as a means of meaning.

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In the voice of
her character, she

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may say it is hard to write down
exactly what the feeling is.

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When I figure it
out, I will insert it

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into this story which I
believe is drawing to a close.

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Or she may frame her stories
with the writer's own premise

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as she does in Saw, a story
in which the character,

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a beautiful woman maimed
by a chainsaw the premise,

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is seen by a perfect stranger.

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And subsequently sawn by her
own hand with his chainsaw.

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These themes of the
ineffable and what

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of one's unfathomable self
might be seen by a stranger,

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carries over into
her poetry where

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it meets up with the
language of logic

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proliferating in its absence.

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"Terror occurs when
one's insides don't match

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one's outsides," she writes.

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Or, "sacrifice equals love,
or does it merely equal loss?

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Nothing beyond the
stopped life of itself."

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Her work, fueled by linguistic
and literary punning,

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is not fraught with it.

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The particularity of her work,
the genuine joy and frustration

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of souls bumping up
against each other,

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lifts her work into a realm
of shared humanity with all

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its opulence and indigents.

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And this is a quote from Karen.

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"The river, with
its captured lights,

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the glint of bridges, the
pockmarked palisades of flame,

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so much of this is untrue.

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A worm slunk in the
sidewalk cracks.

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An old, old woman
wreathed in snot."

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If poems were films and I were
pitching Brennan's aesthetic

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to a producer, I'd
pitch it like this.

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She's Walt Whitman singing the
song of Berryman's Huffy Henry.

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"An old, old woman wreathed
in snot smoked sharply.

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She said, 'just
because you give me $5,

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don't entitle you to my life's
story.'" Please welcome Karen

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Brennan.

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[APPLAUSE]