“Love and the Ten Thousand Things is a book full of edges and urgency, the poems slipping gracefully among their many modes of discourse: cautionary wisdom, intimate muttering, incantation, and awe. Things are some things half-said but never half-felt in these poems, which bring to mind both the fullness of John Ashbery’s world and the simplicity of Li Po’s.”
—Gail Wronsky, author of Poems for Infidels, Dying for Beauty and The Love-talkers
“In his seminal anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960, Donald Allen issued a challenge to poets of the future. Joseph Karasek accepts that challenge. Writing in the tradition of Olson and Duncan, he manifests a lyric consciousness poised on the edge between beauty and terror. Love and the Ten Thousand Things is a masterpiece.”
—Michael Wurster, author of The British Detective, The Cruelty
of the Desert and The Snake Charmer’s Daughter
Joseph Karasek grew up in New York City. He created school orchestras on the elementary and secondary levels, and taught music composition and music theory at Long Island University. He has lived in Pittsburgh, PA since 1991, and now spends his winters in California. His poetry has been published in Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2006) and Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant, 2009).
