Homage to Kafka

ART IN CONVERSATION WITH ART

In contradistinction to the plethora of critical literature that analyzes the oeuvre of Franz Kafka, the poems in this chapbook echo and mirror Kafka's own artist process by which his detached visual descriptions create a sense of the anonymity and alienation of the modern experience. The individuals in Kafka's novels and stories often become mired in or barred from their surroundings, or topographies while trying to resolve their conflicts. The visual descriptions of topography are as integral to the story as are character and plot twists. Hence, the poems in Homage to Kafka employ metaphor, metonymy, cadence, image, assonance, and dissonance to portray the topographical textures in which the characters struggle to achieve both personal freedom and connection to the social order.

The poems have been paired with paintings by Paul Klee for the reason that there are strong artistic congruences between the two men. Whereas both Kafka and Klee have been misconstrued and mislabeled as "fantastical"- meaning portraying as real what does not, in reality, exist-nothing could be more erroneous. In fact both artists intuited certain very real, if disquieting, contradictions, anxieties, and ambiguities in modern life. Including the oscillating processes of emancipation and isolation, as well as estrangement and connection that exist under the benign surface of society.

Unlike the critical literature about Franz Kafka, this chapbook is art in conversation with art.--------------- Advance Praise -------------------Like her subject and muse, Laura Ann Reed's Homage to Kafka contains anxieties, prophecies, and "contagious organisms." The poems understand the contradictions inside Kafka as a writer and person that made it possible for him to locate the contradictions of the world around him. Reed's poems offer an unsettling insistence that readers face reality without blinking and without judgment. The poems get into Kafka's atmosphere as well as the floors of his interior with fresh language and surprising insights. -Sean Singer, author of Today in the Taxi

In Homage to Kafka, Laura Ann Reed uses the alchemy of lyric poetry to evoke the strangeness of Kafka's world. In twelve masterful poems, Reed echoes Kafka's own linguistic powers. The reader is alternately bewildered and illuminated by the cadence, diction, and musicality of her writing. An intangible quality that one finds in Kafka too, in which every word has its precise place even as that same word threatens to open into an abyss of contradictions is to be found in this profound and beautiful collection.

-James R. Martel, professor of political science/Kafka studies, University of San Francisco