Out from Calaboose : New Poems

Poetry. "Clutching her vision firmly in hand, Karen Corinne Herceg paints her inner world in such a vivid fashion that I was compelled to submerge myself in OUT FROM CALABOOSE completely, and then not surface at all until I put down the last poem. What I wove through during the course of that reading was a feast: imagery fine enough that it startled; rhythms that wove from poem to poem, joining all their music together; and language so sleek that not one word had been left standing if it ought not to be. In this collection, Herceg brings us her life and all its many emotional truths, some ugly, some beautiful, but all revealed with restraint--so that by book's end, we are left in wonder."--Linda Gray Sexton

"In OUT FROM CALABOOSE, Karen Corinne Herceg traces what one might call a karmic trajectory from oppressive relationships in adult life back to a controlling or absent parent whose chiseled stone dates leave 'impressions in her flesh.' And, after that, to a freeing."--Roberta Gould

"OUT FROM CALABOOSE is a marvelous, skillful, and evocative work."--Dr. David B. Austell, Columbia University

"This is a remarkable work, a Virginia Woolf moment stretched into a book of poems, or a Whitman rumination that refuses to come to an end, enamored as it is by life's ongoing rush. OUT FROM CALABOOSE affirms Herceg's faith in a poet's visionary status as she imagines her hand reaching toward, snapping through 'embryonic clay' and sculpting lives that could become whole..."--Yuyutsu Sharma, Himalayan Poet