Praise for AMULET
It’s true, as Stephanie Kartalopoulos writes, "[t]here is too much / in this world already." But the poet turns toward it all with her imaginative, insightful voice, her edgy desire, and her unflinching eye, spinning our skeletons into the most poetic amber. These poems are “imperishable,” amulets for the world, and the light that shines through is alive, warm, stunning.
––Amy Newman, author of Dear Editor
and On This Day in Poetry History
Even as Kartalopoulos declares that "there is too much in the world already" and "everything is breaking," these richly polysemous poems invite us to investigate the places where dislocation and decay are barely distinguishable from intimations of the new. With oblique, associational logic, under varied constellations and in mutating weathers, she ponders the algorithmic interweavings of love, family, and soul-making in American and Greece as she labors to "account for...tectonic shift...deformational history" and create "a way to say the being of your hour."
––-Claire Bateman,
author of Scape and Locals: A Collection of Prose Poems
Stephanie Kartalopoulos’s Amulet is a breathtakingly beautiful book that embodies negative capability, though her poetics is less Keatsian than Dickinsonian definition and redefinition. Frequently, the poems define their space by delineating what is not, defying expectations and received ideas: “This is not lightning, /this is not the razor-fast. Instead, a slow-dreaming machine pushing me / through my mad scene, bringing my soprano-pitch / past its breathless height.” Perhaps this kind of causation—if this, then that—a logic of illogic that takes us into utterly surprising places has to do with Kartalopoulos’s being Greek-American. Her diasporic voice portrays a familiar third cultural phenomenon—feeling at home and not at home—in a unique and innovative way. She asks “What if x” and opens up for us vast and mysterious vistas: “Then maybe its own equation: luminous and blinking: / blanketing the mapped thought of what could be possible.”
––Aliki Barnstone, author of Dwelling and Bright Body
