Kara Provost is a poet, runner, mother, and college professor.
Her latest book, Topless, is a collaboration with two other poets and was published by Main Street Rag in 2011. Her chapbook Nests was published in 2006 by Finishing Line Press. She has poetry and memoir published in Connecticut Review, Hurricane Alice, The Newport Review, Tar Wolf Review, The Aurorean, and other journals, as well as in an anthology edited by David Starkey and Wendy Bishop, In Praise of Pedagogy: Poetry, Flash Fiction, and Essays on Composing.
Kara teaches writing and directs the First Year Honors Program at Curry College (Milton, MA) in addition to conducting creative writing workshops. Although she grew up in Florida, she has grudgingly learned to tolerate winter and now lives near Providence, RI with her husband and two daughters. She can be reached at
► Kara's Origami micro-chapbooks & selected poems are available below.
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Origami Micro-chapbook |
Selected Poem(s) |
Cover Photo of Kara
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{mooblock=Writing}
I am mad with words, sick
as Blake’s rose tunneled through by poems like worms, each word eating another red petal. What kind of mother feeds her children poems instead of bread? What kind of wife wishes her husband out the door so she can rush back to her black ink, mark the white paper? What family wants a poet among them, scratching secrets until they bleed? I am obsessed as coyote with full moon, running, nose to trail, poem’s tail swishing into a bush just out of sight. I catch its scent on night wind, howl.
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Kara Provost © 2013
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Kathleen Speranza Painting,
"Nest with Twigs“
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{mooblock=Praise Song}
(with recognition of W. S. Merwin)
You invisible one
music of all the songs sung beat of wind, wing, breath you, purpling the violets after winter’s death
swaying the lace curtain
warming my skin with yellow lifting the scent of jasmine carrying voices through hollows
plunging kill spiral of hawk
cooling green-shadowed woods singing spring water over rock grounding April with deep mud
you, shining on the flashing silver fishes
headying the air with orange perfume feeding shoots reaching up through rot causing all the world to be still or move:
you invisible one
music of all songs sung. •
Kara Provost © 2011
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{mooblock=Youngest Daughter Series}
My sleepy girl tucks
her head beneath my arm, butts: kid seeking comfort. Tucked in mine, swinging: young elephant’s tender trunk, my daughter’s small hand. Wind twirls fall oak leaf sun-gilded—a gold fairy!— she tugs me to see. •
Kara Provost © 2011
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Acknowledgements: “Baby’s Point of View” & “Picking Up” first appeared in Nests, Finishing Line Press: 2006. |
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{mooblock=My Dear Ring}
Yes, yes, I love you—
were we not made for each other? Do I not wear you day and night, wet and dry, only remove you when dough or dirt threaten your beauty? And then how naked I feel, and a slim whiteness circles where your gold should go— I am so marked by you. I confess once or twice in twenty years I have taken you off just to see if the world feels different unchartered, unclaimed, but I missed you, my dear and in truth want no other. Rest easy—I’ll not put you asunder. •
Kara Provost © 2011
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Cover photo: Kathleen Speranza
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{mooblock=everyday eros}
The feel of the shaft in hand
polished as blue stone smooth as lake water surface on summer waveless days rhythm rubs between hot palms into the curved bowl open, waiting with longing. A car rumbles to a stop crickets sing their strings— will she be discovered wrapped in night’s velvet breath mashing garlic in the dark with mortar and pestle, hungry for their bodies’ music? •
Kara Provost © 2011
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{mooblock=Figure of Speech}
“What a lovely figure of speech you have,” the oxy-
moron commented to the epithet, who shot daggers at him from atop stiletto heels, until, leaking metaphors, he fled to conjunction junc- tion and hopped the “A” train, not realizing it was only an article, not a predicate, so couldn’t take him anywhere. As he sat drumming his fingers waiting for the train to move, he sighed a hyperbole like a giant cartoon speech bubble, then grabbed hold of the tail and floated away from all his misery and shame into a setting cliché. •
Kara Provost © 2009
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