Inaugural Reading: Tuesday, April 28th 7:30 pm: Kjirsten Severson & Karen Wood Hepner

If Not For Kidnap Poetry invites you to a comfy night of linguistic terror[1] and love revelation[2] with two fantastic local poets:

 

trained in western philosophy and determined to say the impossible by escaping academic language,kjirsten severson was not prepared for her own writing that began to appear when she moved to portland from pittsburgh at the end of 2003. any readily recognized narrative became invisible.

she acquiesced to this unintentional shift and slowly began to develop her own ideas about what was being written. and what was not. currently, she best describes these pieces as an attempt to see a different humanity by breaking into us via cutting and stuttering language and its spaces, especially those key words and absences that frame our fundamental assumptions, but that we tend to rely upon without notice.

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Karen Wood Hepner writes in the mood of a house haunted-- she creates landscapes inside rooms, hallways, cupboards, and under beds. Karen is fascinated by the movement between inner and outer landscapes, and writes poems that navigate these planes freely. In Karen’s world, what we thought we knew is always ending, we become disembodied, we enter realms that remind us of some kind of hope but don’t offer any. Yet at the same time Karen’s world is almost overly corporeal, carnal, raw. It’s in these meaty, tactile images that she moves us into something completely otherworldly where there is no safety or resolution, and we are very alone. Her poems unfold as truths from this silent space.

Karen’s work has appeared in North American Review, Miranda Literary Magazine, the Monterey Bay Poets’ Anthology, Folio, and Toyon. She was a finalist for the 2008 Wabash Prize in Poetry. She recently received her MFA in Writing at Vermont College, and also recently moved to Portland from California.

 

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Where: 3968 SE Mall St., Apt A

When: Tuesday, April 28^th at 7:30

Come as you are, donations not turned down!

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[1] there will probably be no actual terror

[2] there may be true love revelation, though INFKP cannot be held responsible either way