Feathers and Wedges: Poems

Feathers and Wedges: Poems

From Pine Row Press, available now on Amazon.

“Feathers and Wedges,” winner of the 2022 Julia Peterkin Prize

Praise for Feathers and Wedges:

Feathers and Wedges stays close to home––backyard, a garden, a home office––to meditate on what’s possible after a sizable stretch of life well-lived. There’s optimism for the future, a confidence in the second act of life, a “stone foundation still has life.” The book finds balance by extolling seemingly unlikely candidates for praise (boredom, laziness, imperfection, shampoo, road noise and blue tarps). Human beings appear mostly in their pronoun state, as a “you” and a “we,” who face-off with a chorus line of animals, including cats and rescue horses, skunks and hawks, opossum and coyote, a bobcat and a bear, with possibly the best lines ever written about a woodchuck, “”He’ll never be / anyone’s choice / for state animal.” Gardening happens and deer mice are honored. The collection makes a space for beings larger than us, for finding harmony in interaction with the natural world at its rawest and most lovely of moments.

–Alexandria Peary, Poet Laureate of New Hampshire


In Feathers and Wedges, Karen Kilcup reminds readers that the way we see and interact with nature can be revelatory–the way water moves over rocks can “animate clarity,” the way the beaming Pearly Everlasting “nearly makes us want / to believe in heaven.” Kilcup’s verse is bright, clear, and attentive in poems which echo Neruda’s Elemental Odes in their careful recognition of the world and its many wonders, curiosities, joys and pains. This book is a menagerie of flora and fauna, a catalogue of memory and present delight, an exploration of all that blooms and bleeds under the sky.

–Ashley M. Jones, Poet Laureate of Alabama


Wit and gratitude are the dominant moods of the ode, and Karen Kilcup’s wonderful poems are surely odes (even when they edge ever so close to story and moment). How amazing to find someone so alert to the possibilities of the ode in this crabbed and crabby time! Like Kenneth Koch’s New Addresses, the poems in Feathers and Wedges make their play with a precision that is so casual you might miss at first just how writerly and observant they really are—not to mention wise. This is a book that will return you to what you love in the world.

–David Rivard, winner of the 2017 PEN/New England Prize in Poetry and the 1996 James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets