“One of the pleasures of being a writer is that you can explore anything,” Karen Chase writes in History is Embarrassing, and that’s exactly what she does in this vibrant and wide-ranging collection of essays. Her subjects include her experience as a childhood polio victim and her resulting fascination with Franklin Roosevelt; her imaginative journey into the lives, hearts, and voices of two homosexual lovers in 16th century India; a rollicking road trip across the country with her grown son; her baptism and immersion into the world of guns; and her hair-raising investigation into a bear-poaching ring. What binds them all together is her distinct voice, the startling directness, immediacy, and intensity of her writing, and her fearlessness to go wherever her interests and imagination take her. History may be embarrassing, as her title attests, but Chase is not afraid of being embarrassed, or, for that matter, of spending time alone with a slightly menacing man and his arsenal of weapons, if it might lead to the discovery of something she doesn’t know. Yet there are no easy conclusions or phony epiphanies here, no designs on the reader, but instead many surprises, and an openness that “clears the air for unexpected forces to breathe.” Chase prizes authenticity and has it in spades. Believe me, you’ve never read essays quite like these. They will make you feel “like a hunter walking deep into the forest of knowledge to find god knows what.” Enjoy! |
REVIEWS BNN The Berkshire Edge Chronogram PODCAST |
Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState Karen Chase’s Jamali Kamali & ZundelState are two wildly different yet interconnected works: Jamali Kamali, a homoerotic epic poem that takes place in sixteenth century Mughal India, and ZundelState, a futuristic novella in verse. Each story is its own story, but each story is the story of the world. From the past looking to the future and the future peering back at the past. Enveloping yourself in these pages, you have an experience of the whole world of time. These pages are Technicolor verse. They are visceral. These narratives, alone and together, affect the reader’s body like landscape and you are fully sunk into that landscape when reading. They are stand-alone. They are intertwined. At the core of these stories is the endless possibility of love, language, and the power of the human heart. More than anything, they are an illustration of the author’s range and the possibilities of the imagination. Two Tales: Jamali Kamali & ZundelState is brilliant. Karen Chase is a troubadour of wind, sound, space, time, memory, and desire. —Matthew Lippman, author of We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On Praise for Karen Chase’s previous work “Karen Chase’s poems modulate from the humorous to the erotic and then to the elegiac … All is held together by her skill and intensity.” —Billy Collins, US Poet Laureate, 2001-2003 “A poetic voice of earthy directness and visionary power.”—Amy Clampitt, author of The Kingfisher “Using Sappho’s motto, If you are squeamish/ Don’t prod/ the beach rubble, Chase digs into the past for what can illuminate the present. Sometimes with her heart in her mouth, but always fearlessly, she explores the world in lines of an aesthetic rigor that will win her readers and thrill those who are already among her admirers.” —Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst |