“I’ve been reading Passing Through Humansville during a time of despair, and they are among the few written words that have comforted me. Emboldened me. Spoken. These poems explore marriage and family, nature and politics, and faith and doubt from a wellspring of compassionate wisdom and grace—a still, small (but not timid) voice of a life lived and loved with intention. ‘There are so many / ways to move across Earth’s face and I / would just as gladly move or sit with you,’ Craigo writes. I feel the same way about this book, it’s a companion whose side I won’t leave for long.”
—Tania Runyan, author of What Will Soon Take Place
“‘Something in us wants / to bring in the light,’ writes Karen Craigo as she goes about her everyday routine, quietly crafting music from the common shards of faith, motherhood, and commerce. From blanket forts to voting booths, there’s a wonderful intimacy to these poems, a melding of tenderness and humor that hints at something deeper. Maybe that’s why Craigo has so firmly established herself as one of the most vital and generous poetic voices in America.”
—Michael Meyerhofer, author of What To Do If You’re Buried Alive
“‘Most love requires collapse,’ writes Karen Craigo in her exciting, funny, and sometimes frightening new collection of poetry Passing Through Humansville, which takes on family, aging, god, and language itself. Formally compressed poems sizzle and seethe like pressure cookers threatening to blow up seemingly ordinary scenes of family life, which are by no means ordinary. The mundane becomes electric through Craigo’s extraordinary devotion to detail: a woman bikes in circles in an empty funeral parking lot, mice nest inside a mattress, and eating spiders is an act of faith. The spiritual world is prodded for usefulness and meaning: studying rain is claimed as a form of prayer, and God’s wife is as small as ‘a new pencil, able to coil / her whole self / under a leaf.’ My child-self longs to be in the blanket fort of these poems, learning to be brave, or to pause in the wonder and fragile splendor of a butterfly house, where everything is ‘gold, gold, gold, gold, gone.’”
—Hadara Bar-Nadav, author of The New Nudity
“In Passing Through Humansville, Karen Craigo is the best kind of tour guide—wise, tender, funny and keenly observant of the moments life serves up however large or small. Who among us cannot identify with the weary speaker in ‘Advent’ who finds herself siding with the innkeeper who turned away Mary and Joseph: ‘Damn / but a hard day’s work / should earn us a little rest, / not crisis after crisis.’ I don’t know of another poet who is able to balance feminism, faith, and motherhood as deftly as Craigo does in these poems. These are wonderful meditations on the fierceness of love and the meaning of the word ‘humankind.'”
—Sarah Freligh, author of Sad Math