Published in 2012, my second chapbook, Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt was the winner of the 2011 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest.
Back Cover Blurbs:
The poems in Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt overflow with vivid, gritty imagery. Weyant's intelligence voice conjures scenes of hard-working characters struggling to not just survive, but thrive in their challenging circumstances. This chapbook captures an essential, flamboyant defiance against the landscape, women painting their nails bright colors even as their nigh shifts over their fingers with cuts, bruises and grime. Karen J Weyant is an important new talent and I eagerly anticipate reading more of her wonderful work! --- Jeannine Hall Gailey
Gathered here are poems of place, a place where everything tastes faintly of rust. The speakers are girls and women used to moving through the fields, junkyards, and factories of the Rust Belt, through towns "made of churches/and bars." They speak for those overlooked girls who come of age by learning "to balance in heels, in mud/or dust or rubble." Here are poems both accurate in descriptions and true in spirit. --- Sandy Longhorn
The women and girls who populate Karen J. Weyant's new collection are enigmatic: sharpened by too-early experience, yet with a keen eye and ear for the beauty to be found in their dangerous landscape. Whether it is the blood of a harvest moon or the rust flaking off old pickup trucks, the crinkle of an empty beer can or a jar of trapped bees, Weyant, like her women, conjures a new Rust Belt, broken down to its gritty, elemental base and hauntingly gorgeous. --Katie Cappello
Want to know more?
I talk a bit about the background of his chapbook at Escape Into Life.
Read Kathleen Kirk's review here!
Read Justin Evans' review here!
Read what C.J. Opperthauser has to say here!
Read what Dave Bonta says here!
Read what C.L. Bledsoe says here at Prick of the Spindle!
For even more information, see my author's page at Main Street Rag!
Back Cover Blurbs:
The poems in Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt overflow with vivid, gritty imagery. Weyant's intelligence voice conjures scenes of hard-working characters struggling to not just survive, but thrive in their challenging circumstances. This chapbook captures an essential, flamboyant defiance against the landscape, women painting their nails bright colors even as their nigh shifts over their fingers with cuts, bruises and grime. Karen J Weyant is an important new talent and I eagerly anticipate reading more of her wonderful work! --- Jeannine Hall Gailey
Gathered here are poems of place, a place where everything tastes faintly of rust. The speakers are girls and women used to moving through the fields, junkyards, and factories of the Rust Belt, through towns "made of churches/and bars." They speak for those overlooked girls who come of age by learning "to balance in heels, in mud/or dust or rubble." Here are poems both accurate in descriptions and true in spirit. --- Sandy Longhorn
The women and girls who populate Karen J. Weyant's new collection are enigmatic: sharpened by too-early experience, yet with a keen eye and ear for the beauty to be found in their dangerous landscape. Whether it is the blood of a harvest moon or the rust flaking off old pickup trucks, the crinkle of an empty beer can or a jar of trapped bees, Weyant, like her women, conjures a new Rust Belt, broken down to its gritty, elemental base and hauntingly gorgeous. --Katie Cappello
Want to know more?
I talk a bit about the background of his chapbook at Escape Into Life.
Read Kathleen Kirk's review here!
Read Justin Evans' review here!
Read what C.J. Opperthauser has to say here!
Read what Dave Bonta says here!
Read what C.L. Bledsoe says here at Prick of the Spindle!
For even more information, see my author's page at Main Street Rag!
