Jen Karetnick is the author of 12 collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award and semi-finalist for the PSV 2025 North American Book Awards. Forthcoming books include What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, 2025) and Domiciliary (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2026). The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Cimarron Review, NELLE, Pleiades, Plume, Seneca Review, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, swamp pink, Michigan Quarterly Review, Terrain, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.
An American sentence acrostic Released by age, pharmaceutical rot, infection,by spiral cracks in the foundation, the determining if brief canaling of roots, our teeth lose their blood-warmth and descend from their gummy nests like ants. At first just one. Then, an absurdtrickle, like bitcoin, like stock. Down they come, crushed ice of molars, slivered canines,from the dark quilt of a… Read more →
Something mammalian wakes me, rustling around the wastebasket placed too close to my head as if it were an extra pillow where I’d dropped wrappers from sweets I had sworn I wouldn’t buy at the airport, and even as I leap from the blankets not fully awake yet I recognize how neither of us can escape the harm caused by… Read more →