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Kagayaki Karen Morris received the 2015 Gradiva Award for Poetry, awarded by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP), for this emotionally stunning volume of poetry; the award indeed is well deserved. As the title indicates, the volume is composed of two parts, “Cataclysm” and “Other Arrangements” that suggest Morris's topics and concerns, particularly trauma. She writes movingly and evocatively of physical and emotional trauma, sexism, domestic violence, child abuse, sex trafficking, political oppression, war, and more.
Of great interest is Morris's “Afterword,” an essay that literally is an afterword, following the poetry and offering background and context for the poems. The essay itself is prose, but imbued with poetry because Morris is a consummate poet, even when writing prose. I will let her words speak for her. “Afterword” begins,
When I was twenty-eight years old, a ding-bat flitting around the mountains of New Hampshire, doing donuts in my '64 Rambler on the bellowing ice of Post Pond, midnights, a young man on the other side of the world who was to become my future husband was conscripted into the Iranian army during Saddam Hussein's bloody coup, stationed on the front, gassed, bombarded, and buried alive beneath the bloodied remains of his boyhood friends. (p. 61)
This one sentence is a key to a number of poems, and the essay serves as a tour guide through the many rooms of the mansion of poetry she has built from her own life experience, her resonance