Karen Volkman's first book, Crash's Law, was a National Poetry Series selection, published by W.W. Norton in 1996. Her second book, Spar, received the Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2002 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Norton Introduction to Poetry. From "Brown is the flat": Brown is the flat gestation of a maze, grass-grown remembrance of a second look the field holds open like a nascent book in which the wind has written, Sudden strays, sudden numbers beat-the roots of days branched intangibles a stupor took and slept and stroked and scattered in a shook haze of wakenings, refracting rays outleaping their seasons, daughters of a glance ago-ahead, a retrograde advance.