Aard-vark to Axolotl: Pictures From my Grandfather’s Dictionary by: Karen Donovan
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Aard-vark to Axolotl: Pictures From my Grandfather’s Dictionary by: Karen Donovan
Karen Donovan’s Aard-vark to Axolotl, an eclectic series of tiny stories and prose poems, is based on a set of illustrations from the pages of her grandfather’s 1925 Webster’s New International Dictionary. The author collected pictures of plants and animals, diagrams and devices, and dozens of other charmingly quirky objects and created a new narrative context for each one. Sometimes sneaky mysterious, sometimes downright weird, these small poetic stories work on the reader like alternative definitions for items drawn from a cabinet of curiosities.
Karen Donovan is the author of two collections of poetry, Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press), which won the Juniper Prize, and Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients (Persea Books), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. From 1985 to 2005 she co-edited: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of short prose published by Oat City Press. She lives in East Providence, Rhode Island.
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