Beyond the Velvet Curtain by Karen Kovacik Wick Poetry First Book Series, #5 1999, 80 pp Cloth ISBN 0-87338-646-9 Paper ISBN 0-87338-647-7 Cloth, $22.00 Paper, $14.00 courtesy of our partner, Atlas Books Call (419) 281-1802 to order by phone.

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In Beyond the Velvet Curtain, Karen Kovacik illustrates Czeslaw Miloxz’s dictum that “the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.” Peopled with such diverse characters as Richard Nixon, Nikita Khruschev, Kafka’s father, Dorothea Lange, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Welk, Robespierre, and a feisty Catholic saint, this original collection of poems takes us on an amusement-park ride through world history and art. Kovacik’s poetry places us in the strange drama of cataclysmic events and ordinary life.

Karen Kovacik teaches in the Department of English at Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis. She is the author of the Wick Chapbook Nixon and I (Kent State University Press, 1998).

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