Night's Glass Table

by Karen Zelas

Overview

The poems in Night's Glass Table are tight and emotionally powerful, and deal with themes such as death, grief and love.

Zelas chooses her words with care, and her poems are always eloquent and evocative. She demonstrates a sound use of conventions, and her writing is well-crafted and technically excellent.

Night's Glass Table won the 2012 IP Picks Best First Book Award.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014645980
Publisher:	IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
Publication date:	06/28/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Karen Zelas lives in quake-struck Christchurch. A former psychiatrist and psychotherapist, she returned to university, taking creative writing
papers at Canterbury University in preparation for giving up her day job.

Since 2004, her poetry has been increasingly widely published within New Zealand, including in Landfall, Poetry New Zealand and Takahē,
and broadcast on radio. It has also appeared in Australian ezines Snorkel and Eclecticism and recently been blogged by Interlitq (UK). Several anthologies contain her work. Her first novel Past Perfect was published by Wily Publications in 2010, and was released in ebook editions by Interactive Publications this year.

Having an interest in the visual presentation of poetry, Karen participated, in April 2007, in an exhibition entitled feathers unfettered, featuring her series of poems about native birds of New Zealand. The exhibition was mounted with artist Galina Kim and quilter Sue Spigel, in Christchurch.

In 2009, she was the recipient of a Creative Communities grant. Karen is editor of the anthology Crest to Crest: Impressions of
Canterbury, prose and poetry (Wily Publications, 2009). For the last five years, Karen has been Fiction Editor of Takahē literary magazine and chairs the Takahē Collective Board.

She is married with children, grandchildren and child-substitute: a miniature poodle.

Editorial Reviews

… the mot juste to characterise these poems is the word meticulous: meticulous invocation of place, of nature and of the human heart; meticulous choice of word, the arrangement of words and of their effects; and, ultimately, meticulous in the way the poems contribute to the architecture of the book … This is a rich and evocative set, resonant with other readings, with travel and memory, but above all with Karen Zelas’s carefully wrought language and imagery.

James Norcliffe

… a beautiful collection. Karen Zelas offers a sharp eye for detail, a skilful sense of cadence, an adept command of poetic possibilities and an astute engagement with life’s biggest question. The result is a striking yet accessible first book of poems … lucid yet edgily dark

Siobhan Harvey

It's that play between head and heart that really does typify Karen's Zelas' best poems.

Joanna Preston