I Left My Wings on a Chair

“When the wire man in love with the boiled wool woman imagines himself making love with her under the emerald tree and then making her a mouth, is he desiring to make for her a mouth, or to make of her a mouth? Such questions charge Karen Schubert’s off-kilter worlds with a force less like gravity than like Brownian movement: the poems in I Left My Wings on a Chair don’t orbit, they careen.”—H. L. His “Karen Schubert’s latest collection, I Left My Wings on a Chair, reminds me why I love prose poetry. These are beautiful prose poems; each one is a gem; each one is sublime, witty, and surprising. It’s as if she has taken the world that we see and experience every day and given it back again, refreshed, alive, and shimmering. Reading her poems reminds me of reading William Stafford and Naomi Shihab Nye, poets who let you see the mystical and the absurd in the everyday, who make you feel a little better about being alive.”—Nin Andrews “Karen Schubert’s I Left My Wings on a Chair takes flight through a series of prose poems that stay afloat with sardonic wit and social satire. Schubert takes on everything from Etsy to Wittgenstein to the many Karen Schuberts in compelling, contemplative, and beautifully wrought vignettes. Russel Edson called the prose poem ‘a cast-iron airplane that can actually fly,’ and these prose poems soar!”—Denise Duhamel