Diving at the Lip of the Water

"Karen Poppy's much anticipated debut poetry collection, Diving At The Lip Of The Water, is to be published on May 1, 2023 by Beltway Editions. Poppy, a poet and lawyer, has written a book "that will rough a reader up and then wrap their scrapes in silk," according to Francesca Bell.

Scott Ferry observes that Karen Poppy "wields the power of the immortal in each word, each song."

Sonia Greenfield writes that " the poems...are wide-ranging...whether they're leaping off from the lines of Whitman or Plath, exploring failures of intimacy, or gathering animals in a menagerie of the symbolic, their untamed characteristics bristling at the book's edges and representative of the speaker's own wild sense of self."

This book confronts family systems and societal gender expectations, to reclaim what makes us powerful and whole. It revels in and demonstrates what Judy Grahn calls "paradox and power".

Hence, the diver dives at the lip of the water. What waits for her when she enters? You will find the answer in these luminous, arresting poems."