Poetry by Jen Karetnick, Winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award

Poetry by Jen Karetnick, winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award, selected by Lauren Camp. Camp observes, "The poems in INHERITANCE WITH A HIGH ERROR RATE carry environmental angst and individual, quotidian worries, and also manage to bound with wit and rhythm." Jennifer K, Sweeny writes, "Jen Karetnick is a poet who homes and listens and knows a place ‛as if the land itself is both mind and body." This collection is a feast of care, concern, humor and wit from a master craftswoman at the top of her form.

"So much these days is abstracted by the meaningless language of politics, 24-hour news reels, social media, and disinformation. What the best poets do at their best is to counter that by ascribing authentic experiences and bearing witness to add new dimensions to discourse. This is exactly what Jen Karetnick accomplishes on the matter of climate change, with an authentic pounding of the heart, with a clear mind that explores terror as well as wonder, and with a soul that sees how the natural world connects concretely to womanhood, motherhood, and relationships of every kind. All this through the dexterity of her language that is as evocative and complex as nature itself in all its lushness, grit, grace, power, and vulnerability."--Richard Blanco

"The poems in INHERITANCE WITH A HIGH ERROR RATE carry environmental angst and individual, quotidian worries, and also manage to bound with wit and rhythm. From the edge of the Atlantic, in a landscape rife with moist heat, Jen Karetnick sees the 'too-early bounty' of fruit. Here too is the body with its sharp struggles and markings of age. In form and in free verse, this resonant collection circles alarm, granting a hard-won, clear-eyed survival. ‛This is enough wealth to grip.'"--Lauren Camp

"Jen Karetnick is a poet who homes and listens and knows a place ‛as if the land itself is both mind and body.' In her glorious fifth poetry collection, INHERITANCE WITH A HIGH ERROR RATE, she writes with formal invention into the shifting foundations of the subtropics and its precarious balance of flora and fauna, soil and sea. Of the pygmy octopus found in a parking garage, she says, ‛All three of your hearts were born to know what dying is.' Amidst displacement and upheaval, she continually reaches for the bounty of mangoes, the faith of ants, the language of gumbo limbo, oolite, bananaquit, and fetterbush. In her empathetic rendering of what builds and breaks a landscape, Karetnick has written a masterful paean to ‛the preservation of all that we have been given.'"--Jennifer K. Sweeney

Poetry.