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Press Karen

Karen Press has been a presence in English-language poetry for some time, her work represented in the anthologies "Ten South African Poets" and in "New Poetries II" (1999).
Home, however, is her first book to be published outside South Africa. She brings together work from 1990-5, the poems which she regards as "exploratory tools along two axes of what it means to have a home". The first axis is time: past to present, personal ancestors and public history, personal history and public ancestors. The other axis is spacial, in the present tense, the movement from home to home, exile to exile. Press draws on the history of a particular place at a particular time, but is aware that local struggles to reclaim a home and a narrative of one's own history are echoes of every person's struggle to be at home in the world.

About the Author

Karen Press lives in Cape Town. She has published eight poetry collections as well as mathematics textbooks and children's books. Her poetry has appeared in journals in South Africa, Britain, the United States, Australia and Canada, and in translation in French, Italian, Turkish and Tamil. She co-founded the publishing collective Buchu Books and currently works as a freelance editor and writer.

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