OUT FROM CALABOOSE is a full-length work in five sections with edits by Linda Gray Sexton, bestselling author and daughter of two-time Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Anne Sexton. The poems explore personal healing as well as political, social and ecological awareness. A “calaboose” is a small jail that Herceg uses to symbolize our personal imprisonment from unhealed wounds. She imposes singular and universal imperatives making us aware that it is everyone’s obligation to address these issues.
Karen Corinne Herceg graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University. She has featured at major venues such as The NY Public Library, The Queens Museum, The Provincetown Playhouse, St. John’s University and Binghamton Community Poets with such renowned poets as Pulitzer Prize winners John Ashbery and Philip Schultz and poet William Packard, founder of The New York Quarterly. She has been working with Khalilah Ali, writing her memoirs as the former wife of the legendary Muhammad Ali. Herceg publishes poetry, prose and essays in magazines and literary journals. Her work is read on various radio podcasts.
Clutching her vision firmly in hand, Karen Corinne Herceg paints her inner world in such a vivid fashion that I was compelled to submerge myself in Out From Calaboose completely, and then not surface at all until I put down the last poem. Herceg brings us her life and all its many emotional truths, some ugly, some beautiful, but all revealed with restraint--so that by book's end, we are left in wonder. -Linda Gray Sexton, author of Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back To My Mother, Anne Sexton and Half In Love: Surviving The Legacy Of Suicide
Never trendy, we have here an original in the best sense of the word. -Roberta Gould, Poet (From the Foreword)
Out from Calaboose is a marvelous, skillful, and evocative work. -Dr. David B. Austell, Columbia University
Often it is a pronounced sense of wonder that makes poets like Karen Corinne Herceg. -Janet Hamill, Poet
With rich, metaphorical descriptions, Herceg's honest writing bridges the gap between cultural subconscious and personal experience. -Zoe Siegel, Lunch Ticket, Antioch University
Out from Calaboose is a terrific and powerful book without a misplaced syllable. The poems across the five sections possess energy, a dispassionate passion and generosity in considering the source and sources of imprisonment. They encourage the reader to consider or reconsider his/her own sources of imprisonment by their power and sheer beauty. -Richard Martin, Poet, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Recipient
This is a remarkable work, a Virginia Woolf moment stretched into a book of poems, or a Whitman’s rumination that refuses to come to an end, enamored as it is by life’s ongoing rush. -Yuyutsu Sharma, Himalayan Poet & author of Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems and A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems
The Seligmann Center at The Orange County Citizen’s Foundation is located in Sugar Loaf, NY. From 1940 until his untimely death in 1962, Swiss-born Surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann and his wife Arlette hosted some of the premiere names in the art and literary world at this 55-acre homestead. André Breton, Alexander Calder, Robert Motherwell and Marcel Duchamp are just some of the notables who spent time at the Seligmann home. Kurt Seligmann taught at Brooklyn College and the New School and designed costumes for the NY ballet. He and his wife were interested in magic and the occult, and he published The Mirror of Magic in 1948 that was later translated into many languages. Arlette bequeathed the property to the Orange County Citizens Foundation in 1992 and, subsequently, it was restored. The center includes the home, 4 galleries and performance spaces surrounded by acres of woodlands and wildlife. The permanent collection has over 1,000 photographs, 115 prints and 20 paintings.
There are many fine restaurants and taverns in the area as well as the lovely craft village of Sugar Loaf that is host to fine shops. Many of the artisans live and work in the original barns and buildings that date back to the 1700’s. Visit: www.sugarloafnewyork.com.