The Afterlife is a Dry County

"What a subtle but bracing joy Charmi Keranen's The Afterlife is a Dry County is. In poems such as The South Shore, transcendence emerges out of some paradoxically laid back determination to limn new realities using the particulars of place and mind in order to articulate a unique musicality, a powerful metaphor for the self. Which is to say the poems are sensual, deeply imagined, and visceral. They re also historical, metaphysical, and funny as hell. But Keranen's book is also a package full of things, constructions simultaneously so wholly 'graspable' and disjunctive it feels as if a bell has been rung in the reader's consciousness as he drifts toward the wide open water inside the wake of each poem s lingering and mysterious shadow. One s not sure HOW she pulls so many disparate elements together in such a small space of page and to such startling effect, but it is a pleasure to read, and I know I am richer for it."

-- David Dodd Lee, author of The Nervous Filaments, Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere: The Ashbery Erasure Poems, and Orphan, Indiana.