The name of Karen Donovan's recent book is . . .

Fugitive Red

. . . and it is the winner of the 1998 Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press.

About the Book

In some old prints and paintings, the chemically unstable nature of red pigments causes the color to fade over time. Karen's fugitive red is the echo of lost homes, elusive ruins, and heretofore ungathered voices. Her tools are the microscope, the telescope, the Secchi disc, the leaf blower, the V-8 engine, the enthymeme, the sonogram, prayer, analogy, a jar of pickled eggs. Her fellow travelers are the hatchling spider, the bee, the woolly bear, the slime mold, shad swimming upstream, mud swallows, stray dogs, the drunk, the chemotherapy patient. Her quest takes her from an Amtrak bar car to a hawk hospital to a post office in Tuscaloosa. Along the way she invokes, a host of named guardians, including Tycho Brahe, Einstein, Athena, Victor Lazslo, Leopardi, and Socrates. The result is a collection of poems that blends observation and memory in surprising and original ways.
 

 

The Reviews

 

 "Fugitive Red reads like a master detective's lucid address in response to those bewildering and haunted questions life hits us with day and night. Donovan gives us an accent, a stress, a way of saying look into this, this is it, this is eternal — her brilliance points away from itself to illuminate the world, her patience gives us time to see the world more clearly, her wit makes what we see bearable. Her poems are the reward for the fugitive desires we cannot turn into the authorities." — Dara Wier

  

 

 

 


"The hum we hear everywhere in this book is of well-made poetry meshing with Donovan's free spirit. . . . Fugitive Red sets a new high standard for first books of poetry. It introduces a poet in full, glorious stride." — Tom D'Evelyn


"Borrowing from the vernacular of science, but distilling her language into cadences and shapes familiar to a quotidian tongue, Donovan's poems are accessible yet deftly layered inklings into the peculiar narrative of exile. The exiles here are many: ordinary tourists, businessmen shackled in pinstripes, a lone spider drinking from the only stream for miles, a zebra in a thicket hidden from the sight of the colorblind lion."
 — Sarah Fox, Rain Taxi


"Poet Karen Donovan . . . is a scientist-navigator of words, searching both distant ports and crumbling main streets, furiously scribbling the most intimate details of the world through which she sails. . . . Donovan's poems piece together rhythms that set the pace for everyday life and, indeed, begin to construct a map of human nature. . . . Her trip has not come to an end at the conclusion of Fugitive Red, but we are simply entranced by the journey itself." — Anne Holub, The Hollins Critic


"This is a remarkable first collection, bolstered with a confident voice, acute visual perception, and a carefully plotted course that is nevertheless full of surprise and wonder." 
— David Roderick, Poet Lore
 

 

About the Juniper Prize  The award is named in honor of Robert Francis, who lived for many years at Fort Juniper, Amherst, Massachusetts. It is given biennially to a first book of poetry. 


About Karen Donovan

 Donovan lives on an inlet of Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay and writes about engineering design software. She edits the journal Paragraph and designs handmade letterpress books for Oat City Press. 

Order Fugitive Red

 Fugitive Red is yours for eleven bucks, the paperback. It is available at your local bookstore or by email from the University of Massachusetts Press, P. O. Box 429, Amherst, MA 01004.

Return to Oat City Home Page