OUT FROM CALABOOSE is a full-length work in five sections by poet and author Karen Corinne Herceg with edits by Linda Gray Sexton, bestselling author and daughter of two-time Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Anne Sexton. The poems explore personal healing as well as broader considerations of political, social and ecological awareness. A “calaboose” is a small jail that symbolizes our own personal imprisonment from unhealed wounds. The poet imposes singular and universal imperatives making us aware that it is everyone’s obligation to address these issues.
Clutching her vision firmly in hand, Karen Corinne Herceg paints her inner world in such a vivid fashion that I was compelled to submerge myself in Out From Calaboose completely, and then not surface at all until I put down the last poem. What I wove through during the course of that reading was a feast: imagery fine enough that it startled; rhythms that wove from poem to poem, joining all their music together; and language so sleek that not one word had been left standing if it ought not to be. In this collection, Herceg brings us her life and all its many emotional truths, some ugly, some beautiful, but all revealed with restraint--so that by book's end, we are left in wonder.
www.karencorinneherceg.com