Bøker av Kara Dorris

I dare you to enter Kara Dorris' brutal and astounding HitBox, where we begin "curled up, practicing crash / positions, hearts cradled by claws & wings." Part fairytale, part video game, part self-defense manual, these poems plumb the limits of empathy, the inextricability of pain and healing, and the relentlessness of violence. "You have to hold on & ride, arrive / on the other side despite the hits." Dorris deftly shows us how-how to aim, let go, and "brace for the breaking" in a world where a princess needs an "army knife, a Glock, & some duct tape" just in case the rescue turns assault.-Stephanie Heit, author of Psych MurdersIn Hit Box, Kara Dorris is an open-hearted questioner invested in examining the violent, even absurd elements of our world that most of us readily accept. She highlights our eagerness to crack open piñatas designed as lovable creatures, place bets on delicate racehorses, and play video games that instruct us to "know where to hit" so that we can receive the "reward" of the damsel in distress. But rather than reside in the bitterness of judgment, her questioning inspires a hope for humanity to be more thoughtfully curious. At the core of this collection is a genuine care for others that's laced with optimism and presented with delightful surrealism. The collection never denies the world its evil or shies away from life's darkness-even its title is a reference to damage-and yet when Dorris asks us, "Can we be more than survivalists?," we are comforted that the answer is always yes. -Lauren Berry, author of The Lifting Dress and The Rented Altar"When will we learn / what we starve always becomes claw / & teeth & snarl?" In Kara Dorris' HitBox, bestial commingles with human, darkness with light, ancient with contemporary, mythologies with raw truths. Within, ghost voices of chafing women hum throughout time, "I wanted to be more than a plot point, a reward, a lady- / bug to admire & wheel over & crush." Their narratives, amidst the magical and mundane, reveal profound truths about grief, simultaneously possessing the primal howls of feminine defiance and rage. Approach this collection with your spirit ready to grieve, wonder, survive, and heal. -Anne Champion, author of The Good Girl is Always a Ghost

"Self-elegies are cultural artifacts, lenses for understanding and defining self as well as sharing and creating community.The poems and prose in this anthology are a mix of autobiography and poetics, incorporating craft with race, gender, sexuality, ability/disability, and place"--

Set along lonely highways, the voices within When the Body is a Guardrail are restless and searching-these poems are seeking new ways of seeing, of being, of interpreting what it means to be human. Too often we treat life like a highway, like an 80s rock ballad, as both distance and a bridge, speeding towards some vast unknown, donning knee and shoulder pads, shin-guards and helmets, learning "to pull on flak jackets" and "to tread with stealth" that jewelry "jangles like an aftermath of traps." We want to be close, create intimacy without risk, but fail. And when we fail, we cannot forgive each other, or ourselves. The truth is, we drive into the morning light forgetting that experience will change us by the time we drive home through the evening sun. Each time we change, we become a new person, versions of ourselves that are never fully erased. When the Body is a Guardrail doesn't hide from disappointment or failure, that "soft-wet empty snow already understands." This collection begs us to pay attention: to the isolation of routine and small towns; to our allegiance to beginnings and endings but not to the journey itself; to the addict inside all of us. With eyes on the horizon, we are always looking for that bliss, that Eden, that perfection, and we are always failing. However, these poems are testaments to our resiliency, because despite all our flaws, we keep trying, we keep trucking along with windows rolled down and radios blaring.

Set on the trans-Siberian railway, these poems take up themes of mobility as well as the body and the self created through loss. In the collection, loss is generated through travel as it strips away the mundane routines used to define ourselves, such as homes, careers, families. For example, one poem focuses on the interaction between the speaker and an elderly Russian woman who perceives something evil in the speaker's surgery scars despite the brief encounter. In each poem, we see the speaker evolving and redefining self-identity through location, through unexpected connections and disconnections, through the present and the past. Dorris focuses on the body's role in mobility and self-creation because she has a genetic bone disorder which causes benign tumors, or osteocondromas, to form at her joints. As she grew, so did the tumors interfering with normal growth patterns; her right leg is shorter, her right arm is several inches longer, and she has strange knobs of bone sticking out. All that said, she walks, jogs if she must, dances and hopscotches (although not gracefully). For years she avoided writing about disability because she wanted to avoid sounding melodramatic and self-pitying, but while completing an MFA, she realized her disability colored the way she perceives the world and her role inside it; consequently, her poetics lean towards erasing, running, and eventually disassembling illusions, as well as contributing to the dialogue of disability poetics.