In all these poems
I’m partly somewhere else.
With you, without you,
walking toward you or away,
but you are there, your small face
watching from the shadow of a doorway
or a set of stairs, from behind a curtain or a table.
Sometimes I see you at the piano.
You stop playing, turn to me,
and in that pause,
tell me something necessary.

Poet Karen Enns takes the reader on a lyrical journey, wrapped in the vicissitudes of seasons and weather—while observing human and other-than-human lives. Enns invites us to peer and is concerned always with the locations and dislocations perspective implies and creates.

Ordinary HoursKaren Enns grew up in a Mennonite farming community in southern Ontario. She currently lives and writes in Victoria, B.C., where she works as a private piano instructor. Her first book of poetry, That Other Beauty, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award.

Karen Enns' profile page

"This poet wishes and blows off the mundane until she is left with archetypal shapes, crows and aspirational trees, a Jungian journey.” OR “Karen Enns provides script that looks like skywriting by artful acrobats." —The BC Review

“The world Karen Enns gives us is larger than we know, revealing a spaciousness we imagined gone. Hers is a resonant, fearless voice.” —Anne Simpson

"The power of Enns’s vision derives from her extraordinary ear, its exquisite sculpting of silence. Her free verse is among the most eloquent now being written in Canada." —Jan Zwicky

“Since her first book, I’ve been a fan of Karen Enns. In Dislocations I’d delighted again with her precision with language, her musical ability to allow silence to sit among the words, her connection with the daily things going on around her. The poems are “small mutinies” that quietly demand we live more fully and more generously in this sweet fragile world.” —Lorna Crozier

“Karen's work is masterful in its precision and joyful use of language. It is, like the sparkler she describes in a poem, ‘lit, sizzling’ with brilliance.” —Sarah Tsiang

“Enns plays her phrases with precision, shapes haunting surprise. Dislocations is a candid concert for a grieving world.” —Jane Munro

“Tuned to a cosmic lament, these poems shimmer and burn with beauty and loss.” —Carla Funk