CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/30/2014

'Karen Green: Bough Down' Wins the 2013 Believer Poetry Award

"Karen Green's raw, elegant first book—a mixture of verse paragraphs, images of miniature mixed-media collages (Green is also a visual artist), and blank pages—is a moving portrait of love, marriage, the untimely death of a spouse, the poet's ensuing grief, and the marriage that still, somehow, remains."

"One of the most intimate and effective extended elegies to be published in recent years (joining such notable works as Anne Carson's Nox and Rebecca Lindenberg’s Love, an Index), Bough Down is also a brilliant case study in psycho-emotional realism: in this case, the way that psychological rupture affects the very experience of experience, and the role of language in finding one's way back to normalcy… At all junctures, Green's writing shows life exceeding expectations—exceeding sense—because it exceeds thought. Bough Down is a breathtaking achievement."