Heart’s Hunger: Selected Poems
Karen Press
Heart’s Hunger spans thirty years of Karen Press’s writing, covering love poems, historical-political poems, lyrics, satires and poems of place. Press’s precise and generous poems illuminate her close observation of people, and the places that embrace or refuse them. Her latest book is The Loving and Lovable City (May Not Yet Be Here): An Atlas of the Cape Peninsula.
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For more than thirty years, Karen Press’s poetry has held a mirror up to South Africa. In it, we have seen our shame and our (rarer) heroism, recognised our locales, acknowledged our history, mourned our dead and laughed at our foibles. Heart’s Hunger, a judicious selection from eight collections, is a welcome publication from a quietly distinguished poet who has avoided the limelight. What shines out is not a personality or, God forbid, a brand, but exquisitely precise diction, compassionate observation and imaginative power. To read Heart’s Hunger is not just to know where we have come from, but to feel in a very visceral way what it has meant, what it does mean, to have been born here.
– Finuala Dowling (2024)
Date of publication: 2024
ISBN 978-1-928476-52-8 ebook ISBN 978-1-928476-53-5
220 pages
200 x 130
R300.00
Karen Press 2018 © Daryl Glass
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Karen Press lives in Cape Town, where she works as a freelance editor and writer. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies in South Africa and abroad, and she has published twelve collections of poems. As a translator of Afrikaans poetry she has worked primarily on the poems of Antjie Krog, including Krog’s two recent collections, Synapse and Pillage. Poetry books published Co-editor (with Ingrid de Kok): Spring Is Rebellious: Arguments about Cultural Freedom
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Additional information
| Weight | 0.5 kg |
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Reviews of this book
Review by Mike Hagemann of Heart's Hunger by Karen Press Stanzas, 2025 text PDF
Review by Finuala Dowling of Heart's Hunger by Karen Press The Johannesburg Review of Books, 2024
Other Links
Reviews of other books
Review by Chris Dunton of The Canary's Songbook by Karen Press Sunday Independent, 2006 text PDF
Review by Jane Routh of The Canary's Songbook by Karen Press Tears in the Fence (Carcanet), 2005 text PDF
Review by Jeremy Cronin of Echo Location by Karen Press Sunday Independent, 1998 text PDF
Review by Margaret Lenta of The Little Museum of Working Life by Karen Press Sunday Independent, 2004 text PDF
Review by Priya Narismulu of Home by Karen Press New Coin, 2001 text PDF
Downloadable full book PDF
The Loving and Lovable City (May Not Yet Be Here) by Karen Press privately published, 2023 full text PDF
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