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Caroline Knox's most recent publications are Hear Trains (Wave Books, 2019), To Drink Boiled Snow (Wave Books, 2015), Nine Worthies (Wave Books, 2010) and Flemish (Wave Books, 2013). Quaker Guns (Wave Books, 2008) received a Recommended Reading Award 2009 from the Massachusetts Center for the Book. He Paves the Road with Iron Bars, published by Verse Press in 2004, won the Maurice English Award 2005 for a book by a poet over 50. A Beaker: New and Selected Poems appeared from Verse Press in 2002. Her previous books are The House Party and To Newfoundland (Georgia 1984, 1989), and Sleepers Wake (Timken 1994).
Her work has appeared in American Scholar, Boston Review, Harvard Magazine, Massachusetts Review, New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry (whose Bess Hokin Prize she won), TriQuarterly, The Times Literary Supplement, and Yale Review. Her poems have been in Best American Poetry (1988 and 1994), and on Poetry Daily. Six poems are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, Second Edition. A chapbook appeared from Five Hundred Places, edited by the artist Jason Dodge, in 2013; thirteen poems from To Drink Boiled Snow comprise this book.
She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council (1996, 2006), The Fund for Poetry, and the Yale/Mellon Visiting Faculty Program. She was the judge for the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America in Spring 2003, and was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard in 2003-2004. With Matthea Harvey and Peter Gizzi, she was a judge of the James Laughlin Award 2007.
(Author photo by Juliana Knox) -
Reviews
Hear Trains
She is often obscure, but her allusions are as much a sign of camaraderie as of scholarly pretension, her poems a pert crystallization impossible in more narrative poetry.
The New Yorker
[Knox’s] poems are a tour de force of torque. They are under pressure. They are pressure, applied to language, applied to what the mind can do, and the senses. . . . Knox [has a] gift not only for incision and intellectual agility, but also emotional resonance.
Mary Ann Samyn, Electronic Poetry Review
Her poems invite the more intellectual emotions: bemusement, the breathlessness of newborn understanding. They’re a treat for anyone who likes to have her brainstrings tugged.
Polly Shurman, The Village Voice
One might argue that nothing is sacred in Caroline Knox’s work, but it would be truer to its spirit to say that everything is sacred here—and all are welcome.
Rebecca Frank, Boston Review
Any word be it rose or usufruct is occasion for a larkishness. "We trip and drop deeply" over and into the drifts of her lines. A most inquisitive poet who relishes living inside her expansive vocabulary; one who has been faxing by the midnight oil while so many others were dipping their quills into dry sockets. Caroline Knox reminds us how whangy and interesting it all is.
C.D. Wright
Reviews of books by Caroline Knox
To Drink Boiled Snow
Flemish
Nine Worthies
Quaker Guns
He Paves the Road with Iron Bars
A Beaker
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Poems
- “Double-Dare” (in Map Literary)
- Excerpt from “Objects” (on s[r] blog)
- Collection of poems (in The Common)
- Excerpt from “Subjects” (on Poets.org)
- “Three Poems” (in Yew Journal)
- “The Scottish Play” (in The The Poetry)
- “Harley Lyric” (in Notnostrums)
- Three poems (in Fou)
- “Flemish” (in Boston Review)
- “Marston” (in Octopus Magazine)
- “Coordinates” (in New American Writing)
- “Dress Pattern with an Interior” (on Verse Daily)
- “My Husband Sat Up” (in Boston Review)
- “His Heart” (in Poets.org)
- Two poems (in Electronic Poetry Review)
- “Glassworks” (in Fence)
- Five poems (in Jubilat)
- Three poems (in Slope)
- “To Drink Boiled Snow” (in Express Milwaukee)
- “Poem for Other Poems” (on Coconut Poetry)Essays
- “Two Middle-aged Springer Spaniels” (in Superstition Review)Interviews
- Jubilat
- The The Poetry, with Sarah Eggers
- BOMBLOG, with Jason Dodge
- Rob McLennan's Blog, with Rob McLennon -
Audio
- At State of the Union: a Poetry Reading (Knox was one of fifty contributors to State of the Union: 50 Political Poems)
- Reading “They had it in mind” for The Common -
