CavanKerry Press

It is my great pleasure to introduce Joan Cusack Handler's CavanKerry Press to you. Named for the two Irish counties where her parents were born, CavanKerry brings the literary gusto of first books, anthologies, and critical books about poets and poetic to American letters.

Looking for the second book of her initial season, Handler turned to admiring notes left by the distinguished poet Amy Clampitt before her death about the bold, intense poems of Karen Chase. Handler asked Chase to make a book of these rich, earthy poems, culminating in what Clampitt called the "demonic astonishment" of Chase's long poem "Kazimierz Square." Using Sappho's motto, If you are squeamish/Don't prod/ the beach rubble. Chase digs into the past for what can illuminate the present, “armed” always, as Andrei Codrescu notes, with a “shield of humor." Sometimes with her heart in her mouth, but always fearlessly, she explores the world in lines of an aesthetic rigor that will win her readers and thrill those who are already among her admirers. Billy Collins has called this remarkable volume "humorous...erotic...[and] incandescent."

I hope you will read and enjoy Chase's work and know there is more coming from CavanKerry. The Press's first anthology, The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Robert Frost Place, will include poems by Donald Hall, Hayden Carruth, Katha Pollitt, Robert Hass, Charles Simic and Grace Paley; and CavanKerry's first critical edition, Singing Aloud: Considerations of Carolyn Kizer, will include essays by Maxine Cumin, Carol Muske, Alfred Corn, Henry Taylor, and Fred Chappell.

It is a great pleasure for me to be part of CavanKerry, and I hope you will share my appreciation of Karen Chase's wise and vigorous book, Kazimierz Square, with an introduction by Amy Clampitt.