Every Other Year is Odd by Karen Wingett

Karen Wingett’s words are a treat to read. She invites readers to have intimate conversations with her poems.  Her poetry offers a sensitive, yet heartbreaking description of life and loss.

Readers experience the excitement of watching the Beatles on TV through her vivid account. “We scream in desire, memorize lyrics, write fan letters, play 45s: “Please Please Me” and Love Me Do” on little record players in our rooms.”

We cry with her as she writes of her father’s death, “By the bed where his second daughter will hear his last breath, he sleeps fractured.”

–Lin Marshall Brummels author of Hard Times, 2016 Nebraska Book Awards Competition Chapbook Category winner.

In her latest chapbook, Every Other Year Is Odd, Karen Wingett offers wonderfully detailed reflections on some significant events in her past, rendering them so well that the reader can’t avoid a feeling of being there: missing one’s Native classmate at a fourth-grade birthday party; with one among the ecstatic mass of teenage girls watching the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show; in a Catholic hospital before and after surgery, for a tonsillectomy, for knee surgery, for cataract removal; sprawled on the concrete in a gas station in Uruguay with a just-broken arm. In poem after poem, these detailed reflections ring so familiar they feel like a reader’s personal memories.

–Neil Harrison, award-winning author of Back in the Animal Kingdom and In the River Wild