Organ Language

In 2023, poet Jen Karetnick’s then-22-year-old son donated a living kidney to his childhood friend. The poems that arose from that bonding experience between the two young men form the loose narrative of Organ Language. Written in a variety of free verse, received forms, and invented forms, the book also explores the functions of and diseases that affect all sorts of human organs, from brain to skin to tongue, as well as the organisms that this Miami-based poet encounters in her quotidian, subtropical environment.

PRAISE FOR ORGAN LANGUAGE

In Jen Karetnick's exciting new collection, Organ Language, she proves herself to be a virtuosa of contemporary form-from the golden shovel to the nested villanelle-from the ghazel to the sonetal-Karetnick moves skillfully into ever more musical realms, as if searching for the precise vessel for these poems of the body, human and otherwise. In "Abandoning Breathwork" the human body is expertly linked to the ocarina-a thousands year-old flute and in "Steaming the Wallpaper, 1973'' a kitchen was a heart, its double arteries shuttered. However, it is this poet's surreal humor that I admire most as in "Love in the Middle Ages," where love holds the remote; I / don't control its selections. Or in "Poet as Kidney Stone," carving a path where there was none before. These poems feel hard won and wise in the best way. Brava!

-Susan Rich, author of Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds and Blue Atlas

From pollen on neanderthal graves, to the deluge that comes for homes and cars, Jen Karetnick gives us rich poems layered with ancient flora, with a lush animal kingdom, and the deep well of loss-as if all that emptiness was made possible by myriad forms of life. Organ Language is a book of deep knowing, a book with a love for words and the way they taste in the mouth. It's a book about sacrifice, a son donating his kidney to a friend. Karetnick investigates her world with tenderness and with the knowledge that she's embedded in history.

-Anne Marie Macari, author of Amerigun