Nothing Happened Last Night by Karen Morris

Karen Morris’s exquisite Nothing Happened Last Night sings with an uncommon knowledge of literary history, psychological acumen, spiritual insight, and wide-ranging cultural influence. She unassumingly welcomes us to a mesmerizing whirl of oft-overlooked myth, to romantic heights, to the contemporary environ of rage, on into baroque evocations of the psyche — be it the inner whirlwind of a “dream’s entangled vines” or the orderly escape of “fresh mint tea.” Morris creates tapestries, weaving the arcane with the familiar in a voice so conversational that when she alludes to “Madonna tripping lightly in kinky boots,” “Mayakovskian clouds,” or “Kalashnikov in camouflage fatigues” we nod and say, “Of course.” Nothing happened last night? Not if you enter the vertigo evoked by this collection’s dazzle.

–Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron, named by Foreword Review one of the two finest collections of poetry published in 2013.

Artistic poet and psychoanalyst Karen Morris‘s vibrant collection alternates between soulful introspective tenderness and vituperative rage. Karen Morris‘s poetry reminds me of a blend of the elegiac phrasings of Reynolds Price, mixed in with the fierce-edged glinty sharpness of Charles Bukowski. The emotional truths uttered, evoked and unconcealed in this book provide emotional, intellectual, and psychical nourishment.

–Dominique Nahas, Artist, and Independent Art Critic

I stand before these poems in a new trance.  Extreme agility of language meets purpose in each line of world-flipping transformation and generosity.  With a magician’s skill, Karen Morris transforms dots to planes, planes to flesh, heart to phrase.  She is the cartographer of the unfaced.  Her maps guide us in realms from the intensely personal to the global.  These poems bring us fractal yet graceful experience, above and below the waterline.

–Beth Jacobs, PhD, Author of Long Shadows of Practice: Poems, The Original Buddhist Psychology, A Buddhist Journal.