Karen Knight – September 12 2021

Liptember (Lifeline) – commit to wearing this lippy throughout September to raise funds for women’s mental health

Karen is an award-winning poet whose work has been widely published in in Australian and overseas anthologies, journals and newspapers. She has held two residencies at Varuna and a residency in Edinburgh, Scotland, and has been the recipient of several grants from the Australia Council and Arts Tasmania as well as the 2005 Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship Award. Karen regularly collaborates with other poets, musicians, and visual artists. Her long-distance collaboration with Scottish poet Dilys Rose resulted in Twinset and her two-year collaboration with printmaker Michael Schlitz resulted in Balancing, an artist book of woodcut prints and poems. Karen frequently performs her work solo or accompanied by her percussionist partner, Jules Witek. She is one of the five writers represented in Republican Dreaming and Of Things Being Various, and her poetry has appeared in Best Australian Poems 2005. Karen’s other publications include Interior Despots: Running the Border, co-edited with Sue Moss; Under the One Granite Roof; My Mother has Become: a sequence; Singing in the Grain and Doctor Says. The poems in Postcards from the Asylum arise from her experiences in a psychiatric hospital where she was subjected to invasive shock therapy. She was probably suffering from SAD (seasonal affective disorder), a condition arising from lack of sunlight which is very treatable these days.

Postcards from the Asylum
Pardalote Press, 2008; ISBN 9780980329728
These poems arise from Knight’s experiences as an inmate at the Royal Derwent Psychiatric Hospital in 1969. John Foulcher says of this collection: ‘Karen Knight’s writing is insistent, vivid and brutal in its objective description of a devastating experience. Most striking in this compelling collection is Knight’s unique gift for imagery that feels both surreal and intensely actual. This is poetry that stares down the reader, that refuses the easy gesture, that never approaches self-indulgence or self-pity. It invites favourite comparison with Robert Lowell’s cold, confronting reflections on the experience of being institutionalised. Knight’s Postcards from the Asylum is not merely a welcome addition to Australian poetry, it feels like a necessary one.’

Renovating Madness – Co-written with Liz McQuilkin
Walleah Press, 2018; ISBN 9781877010415
‘The history of the treatment of mental illness is a story of neglect and ignorance, resilience and rebellion, and … outright cruelty. The poems, narratives, reflections, records past and present collude to create powerful reminders of forgotten or forsaken lives and the impetus to treat mental illness with compassion and open-mindedness.’ – Sarah Day
‘Here are poems that shed an uncompromising light on that other and lesser known island shame, the institution I grew up calling ‘the loony bin’. Here are poems brave and scintillating, poems edged in frost … that showcase the literary verve of two of the island’s most original and accomplished talents.’ – Pete Hay