Drawing on Tales to Explore Roles—and Whiteness
a review of Dear Empire by Holly Karapetkova
By Naomi Thiers
Holly Karapetkova seems to me a poet who understands the power of spells, of arranging words so that they get to a more primal level of meaning beyond whatever ordinary situation her words describe. The first poem in Dear Empire (Gunpowder Press, 2025) could almost be a blessing or spell for motherhood. It begins, “Like any mother, I lived for my children. Bone of my bones, gave them my body as house, gave them my house as home. I was fruitful, I multiplied . . . What I called them became their names.” The words hang in such a way that something slightly unreal—gift or curse—seems about to break through.
Holly Karapetkova is a D.C. area poet and professor at Marymount University, and a former Poet Laureate of Arlington. Her two previous poetry collections, which I’ve read and enjoyed, are Words We Might One Day Say (WWPH, 2010) and Towline (Cloudbank Books, 2016). Dear Empire won Gunpowder Press’s Barry Spacks Poetry Prize.
As in her other books, some of the best poems in Dear Empire use fairy tales, legends, and Biblical tropes to express how people can get trapped or trap themselves in rigid roles—and how cruel impulses emerge in unexpected places. In this book, which focuses a lot on how brutal to people of color U.S. society has long been, “Wild West” tropes are also crumbled to bits to reveal their dark underside. The prose poems that draw from such sources, especially, use language playfully to expose the arrogance of conquering figures:
The man on the horse has the high ground, the high air, the high hat. He moves as fast as (if not the wind) a beast, having claimed a beast and made it ride. He claims the ground, arriving first to stick in his flag. The man on the horse looks down on you when he talks. His words fall, heavy as clods of dirt off the side of a cliff, which makes you think of avalanche
(“High Hat”)
…or to consider the moral compromises people make, as do these lines from “The Pea”:
As for the pea, the prick of the spindle, how they force their way into the deepest sleep, the most secret chambers of the castle. Even the richest and most coddled of us finds herself sleeping in a stranger’s bed, lost in a stranger’s woods
Karapetkova, who is white, also writes a lot here about a white person becoming aware of her own whiteness, realizing how much of U.S. culture takes whiteness for granted as the norm, how un-tuned-in white people can be to privilege. Here’s one of the best:
W[h]it[e]ness
No one had to say the word
white
what it meant
clear
as the air in my lungs breathe
clear as nothing is clear look
No one had to sit me
down
in the kitchen
say
your eyes
your hair
my body
light
a window
you could
see right
through
This poem is one of several in a double voice—one speech progressing down the left side of the page and a semi-connected other going down the right. You can read the poem by going down the left column, then the right column or by reading across the page. Either way makes (imperfect) sense, just as—if I interpret the writer’s purpose right—two ways of perceiving the same event or condition can coexist but never quite be reconciled.
Other excellent poems about this slippery subject start with the white speaker’s experience, such as of attending integrated schools, yet “they sat at their own lunch table, formed/ their own game of tag at recess” (“Neighborhood Games”) or of feeling the glow from that charitable ‘80’s project United Support of Africa (“We sang for starving black kids/ In Africa we’d never meet/ avoided the black kids/ we saw every day at school/ in the stairwell/ in the bathroom”). These poems connect to a real voice and vulnerability, so they draw me in, inviting me to think along. Others are less subtle. “Breakfast of Champions” seems voiced by not a person, but the concept of meritocracy personified. I couldn’t help feeling hit over the head by the poem’s message; consider these lines:
I am awakened each morning
by a million pixels:
the light of my own face,
selfie smiling on my smartphone. . .
. . . My gold medal is bigger than yours
and it’s got nothing to do with luck;
It’s all pluck and hard work
and tax breaks targeted
to stimulate the economy.
Poems in the book about atrocities connected to race in which the speaker (herself invisible) bluntly reports bare elements of actual past events—like poems about lynchings and “La Bestia,” which describes the stream of immigrants coming from Latin America—are also powerful. Karapetkova gets the “spell” element into these, too. From “Lynching: A Brief History”:
Start with a river.
Let it be deep and wide.
Let it pass 10,000 cubic feet
of water per second.
There are still things that won’t
sink, that won’t be washed
to sea.
What I like best in the poems in this collection is the writer’s skillful use of metaphor. An arrogant man’s words fall like dirt clods, the desert stretched before a refugee is “the unsewn hem of a nation,” railroad tracks “split like a cracked jaw.” My favorite poem, “Rage,” weaves in killer metaphors for strong emotion almost imperceptibly:
When you turned and left
something turned in me:
a knot
a ringing
ripping through me
like a key’s
cold metal.
Such fresh comparisons are part of how Karapetkova gets a reader to feel something strong and unexpected, simply through her words. I think many readers—especially those interested in wrestling with issues of race and privilege or those who like fresh takes on familiar tales—will want to come under the spell of this book.
Buy your copy of Dear Empire directly from the publisher, and support this independent press.
Holly Karapetkova will appearing locally at the following events:
Tuesday, April 29, 7 pm
Kramer’s Books, with Courtney LeBlanc and Tracy Diamond
1517 Connecticut Ave, Washington, DC
Thursday, May 1, 6 pm
Celebrating Community Through Poetry: Three Arlington Poets Laureate
Mason Exhibitions, 3601 Fairfax Dr, Arlington, VA
Sunday, May 11, 4 pm
The HOT L Poets Series with Lesley Wheeler
The Ivy Bookstore, Baltimore, MD
And she has additional appearances scheduled! Learn more about the author, including more upcoming events, on her website: www.karapetkova.com
Holly Karapetkova is a Poet Laureate Emerita of Arlington, Virginia, and a recipient of a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her work with young poets. A winner of the 2024 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize for Dear Empire, she is the author of two previous books of poetry, Towline and Words We Might One Day Say. She lives in Arlington, Virginia, and teaches at Marymount University.
Naomi Thiers has published five poetry collections including Only the Raw Hands Are Heaven (WWPH), In Yolo County and She Was a Cathedral (Finishing Line) and Like a Bird Released (Sligo Creek Press). Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, and many others. She lives and writes in Arlington, Virginia.
