THE TRANSFER TREE
Karena Youtz
Get ready to enter The Transfer Tree, an aching fairy-tale world, and meet the paralegal researcher, poet, angels, shamanic tree, radiant fields, sun, moon, and rocks dizzingly spinning, dislocating, collapsing again and again within their own exploding bodies. Why? Because “The world will never be okay.” -DON MEE CHOI
It is impossible to write with any common sense upon the experience of receiving or living coincident to the poetry of Karena Youtz without feeling some despair that to do so risks folding even the most fractional corner of possibility over upon the present calling of its earth. I see and rehabilitate by Youtz’s poetry, reconcile before the revelation of its transplacing maps. And The Transfer Tree … it overwhelms me, for its existence back through elemental ash, up through the crown of light’s troublous intensities. The Transfer Tree is this. It induces life, gathers sky as ceiling into it. Karena Youtz is the Tree’s fortune, the Tree incarnation back into the earth. I think of Blake spending his last breath on sketching Dante’s Inferno into the form of what he took it to be. I think of young H.D. seeing in a flash of vision an altar-shaped stone hovering in the air before her. And I cannot help but think of the ancients—Alice Notley back through Lord Krishna—feeling sharpened relief and increase by Youtz’s total commitment to apperception and experience by the day and by art, that the widening limits so touched have not been in vain, and are clearly just now here beginning. -BRANDON SHIMODA
The Transfer Tree conjures real invisibles — it’s a visionary journey and a diagnosis, in the grand tradition of The Descent of Inanna, Blake, Yeats, Merrill, Notley. Karena Youtz is a mystic poet dressed in the navy Idaho sky and possessed of a raving sanity. -CATHERINE WAGNER
Watch Karena & Doug Martsch as The True Wheel!: