A Review of Portable City by Karen Kovacik

A poetry publication can at once be a teacher, a seeker, a refuge, a kindred spirit, an art exhibit, and an agent for social change. In Portable City, Karen Kovacik accomplishes all of these roles and more, framed literally and figuratively by “city.”

In section one, “Atlas,” Kovacik invites readers to consider “city” through fresh “ins,” such as with her title poem, gorgeous, thought-provoking, and like Mary Poppins’ bottomless carpet bag, surprising, only with gravitas, as when she speaks of Indianapolis: “You won’t find graffiti there, / but you’ll see racecars lapping each other / and peace pipes unsmoked / for a hundred years.”

Cities span the globe but since the poet is Polish American and a Polish-to-English translator, a special focus on Poland pervades “Atlas.” Whereas the free verse poem, “Rothko in Warsaw,” traverses the painter’s history in the context of a violent and changing world, “at the hour of our red amen,” the second-person prose poem, “The Five Places for Kissing in Warsaw,” immerses readers in a closely tactile experience of “Soviet-era sconces turn[ing] on” and “feeling each willow-switch of sound.”

This focus continues in part two, “Alphabets,” with “Pandora Speaks,” dedicated to an aunt in Jankowice, Poland. In sections that span personal and familial history, the narrative focuses on language and culture, exposure and change. Each poem in “Alphabets,” in fact, relates to language, from a writer’s beginnings in crayon in “In the Letter R” and learning a new language in “Polski,” to translation in both “For Zbigniew Herbert” and “Translating a Novel.” My personal favorite, “Chamber,” entails use of the ghazal form, which originated in Arabic poetry: subtitled, two-line stanzas that delineate the progression of English from 54 BC, “Dust-dwellers and crannog-builders, hunching beneath the legions’ / aquaductal laws, you sweated the first pangs of English” to present day. A docupoem, speakers change throughout the work, which progresses to the beauty of English, in its myriad dialects, inextricable politics, and roles of the writer therein.

Portable City is a journey of discovery of places external and internal.

“Hours,” Kovacik’s third section, turns to “cities” visited in short spans, whether through religion or history, imagination or rumination. In “Hands with Wings,” for instance, “for the massage therapists of Kyiv,” she examines said therapists giving massage to those individuals affected by the war:

We can tell when you slept in the metro

Or when a missile cratered your niece’s school.
How you slithered through a tunnel

After the hospital was hit…

Written in two-line stanzas, enjambment is powerful throughout the piece.

The poet traverses considerable territory in “Hours,” from the history of female scribes in “Vessel, Vassal,” to more personal hours, such as in “Reading about Harvey Weinstein in The New Yorker while waiting for trick-or-treaters to show up”—an interrogation of creepy celebrities and female aging, from prey to invisible. Readers also glimpse what is, in part, to come in section four: grief.

“Ithaka,” part four, symbolizes home, end of a journey, a fight for what is cherished, insight, and longing, all of which are contained within Kovacik’s verse. A widow, she misses her husband nearly palpably, such as in “Rose-Flavored Ice Cream with Tart Cherries,” “Hook and Eye,” and “Death and Turbotax”—all quiet laments for small things once taken for granted that become caverns when loss befalls. While I felt that “Turkey Vultures” could have been placed earlier in the section for chronological reasons, the work proves powerful with its question:

Are they harbingers who’ve somehow
chosen me—this house 
where death roosted for years
with smothering wings?

While the majority of Kovacik’s poems average two pages in length, the final poem and star of “Ithaka,” “The Achilles Chronicles,” written for Flemish surgeon, anatomist, and author Philip Verheyen, crosses five pages. Entwining stories from the lives of Verheyen, the poet, and the mythological figure Achilles, it proves insightful about such verities as resilience:

All told, Portable City is a journey of discovery of places external and internal and a work that readers will carry in the suitcase of the mind, unpacking it again and again.