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Jar of Pennies by Sean Karns

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    "Sean Karns will break your heart. The narrator of this collection makes starklyvivid the hardscrabble background of his life: an unhappy mother who worksat the slaughterhouse, a father whose farm fails, a boy who loves both butplays the piano to escape. A group of poems referencing the likes of WalkerEvans and James Agee enlarges the context considerably. There is a doomedaffair, a brilliant dream sequence about the father, and a field of"cornstalks...flutter[ing] their death rattle." Deeply sad, profoundly moving,and seductively musical, these poems are a testament to survival and art." - KELLY CHERRY, author of The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems


"Sean Karns' Jar ofPennies is a moving and harrowing book full of Levis and Levine. At times the poems are parable-like, as in the opening poem where a father and son casually slice apart a globe is if they own--let alone understand--the larger world it represents. Elsewhere, there's a subtle, stunning surrealness: "The ash of bone is fog."But, ultimately, this is a book of unflinching attention to the world of thesemi-rural Midwest, a landscape of paper mills, tenant farmers,slaughterhouses, "death-yellow" cornfields, and steel mills "with smoke stacks like skyscrapers." Karns' vision is so stark and apt--a scar on a shoulder shines "like a pink marble," two men skinning a buck "pull the buck's hide /like tugging on a bell rope in a tower"--it's impossible not to be drawn bythese poems to that place of awe where horror, beauty, and sorrow merge."


--Wayne Miller, author of TheCity, Our City

    Review

Karns knows how to take "comfortable" narratives and give them their power through accurate, intimate detail. The honesty with which Karns speaks from the depth of himself possesses all the hefty weight of a jar of pennies in a toddler's hands. -Los Angeles Review


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Poets and Dreamers

San Clemente, CA

So we travel on earth seeking the terrain of Poetry, walking through wilderness and empty landscape or visiting those ancient sites like Dholavira in far-western Gujarat, or Mykenai in the Greek Peloponnese, or the Arawak campsite on eastern Carriacou in the Grenadine Windward Isles, pursuing that authenticity of experience in a form of antique material reality...

These are places, strange and vague situations where death is manifold and thoroughly extant to the careful eye. There are women’s bangles made of shell to be picked up from the saline dust or small copper beads and thin chert blades, or tiny obsidian arrow-heads that can be unhidden and disclosed beneath those bloody grey walls about the Lion Gate, or beautiful indented potsherds and ceramic fragments at the waterline where the Atlantic rolls out its long blue visceral waves...

Kevin McGrath 🐚Yoga of Poetry
​

“Dare to live the life you have dreamed."​
Ralph Waldo Emerson
​
What began as a series of literary salons and writing workshops is now a worldwide circle of literary & fine artists who believe that words, art, and music act as a transcendent bridge, and allow us to create the lives we have imagined. Poets and Dreamers Literary Circle and the Poets and Dreamers Literary & Fine Arts Journal exist as opportunities for authors and artists to actualize themselves through collaboration and the circulation of literary and fine arts.

"Remember...the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you."
~ Rumi

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  • Home
  • Dreamers and Displaced
    • Poetry
    • Fine Art
    • Fiction
    • Poetry...more...
    • Non-Fiction
    • Author Interview
    • Book Review
    • Media
  • Past Issues
    • Late Summer Light >
      • Fiction
      • Poetry
      • Non-Fiction
      • Book Reviews
    • Treasure in Red >
      • Fine Arts
      • Performance
      • Poets and Dreamers Literary Journal >
        • Events
    • Blue Stars
    • Transformation
  • Books
  • Submit
    • Upcoming Issue
    • Usage Rights
  • SHOP