Description

ISBN: 9781930781696
LCC# 2025951224
Binding: Tradepaper
Pub date: August 17, 2026

Advance praise for Reckless Shelter:

 
“Karen Holmberg has long attended to ‘the terror / that lines our hunger for transparency,’ and her attention has never been as unflinching as it is in this collection. Her gaze is increasingly alert, open, tender. It is as if she is listening to the quality of light by which she sees and giving voice to its shaping pressures.  In her poetic assemblages, the lusterless and fragile are turned over, reconsidered in shifting luminosities and shadows. Her poems call us to feel ourselves as ‘another cell in the word’s endlessly unbuilding and rebuilding body.’ Reckless Shelter is a supple and bracing meditation on how the invisible world clings to the visible one.”

—Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine
 
“The gorgeous poems in Karen Holmberg’s Reckless Shelter insist on close looking as a form of care and repair. Without shying from the ‘bruised being’ of our imperiled environment, her eye insists on ‘tilting/ ill to still, old to gold, loss to gloss.’ She links scintillant imagery with sumptuous figurative language to praise the restorative power of friendship, mourn lost elders, and look forward with wary hope as her own daughters come of age. Tender in the attention they bestow on humans, plants, and creatures of all kinds, these poems radiate love for ‘this wonder/ and wounder of a world.’”

—V. Penelope Pelizzon, author of A Gaze Hound that Hunteth by the Eye
 
“Holmberg’s mother was the inspiration for the poet’s grave attention to nature, a shared gift, ‘mother, daughter, / an octave apart.’ By initiating her own daughters into this matrilineal inheritance, Holmberg reveals the complicated harmonies of her life through poems buoyed by precision, exquisite tenderness, and a penetrating music all her own.”

—Gary Young, author of No Other Life
 

About the Author

Karen Holmberg won the 2025 Cider Press Review Editors’ with Reckless Shelter. Reckless Shelter is scheduled to be published in August, 2026. Holmberg’s two poetry volumes are The Perseids (winner of the Vassar Miller Prize/University of North Texas Press) and Axis Mundi (winner of the John Ciardi Prize/BkMk Press). In addition to poetry, she publishes lyric essays and art criticism, appearing in At Length, Tupelo Quarterly, and the Notting Hill Editions Prize anthology. Recent poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, and were featured in the spring issue of High Country News. Her first young adult novel, The Collagist, won the 2021 Acheven Prize and was published by Regal Press/Fitzroy Editions in the spring of 2024. She teaches British Literature, poetry writing, and letterpress printing at Oregon State University, where she is on the MFA in Creative Writing faculty.