In 2023, poet Jen Karetnick’s then-22-year-old son donated a living kidney to his childhood friend. The poems that arose from that bonding experience between the two young men form the loose narrative of Organ Language. Written in a variety of free verse, received forms, and invented forms, the book also explores the functions of and diseases that affect all sorts of human organs, from brain to skin to tongue, as well as the organisms that this Miami-based poet encounters in her quotidian, subtropical environment.
Praise for Organ Language
From pollen on neanderthal graves, to the deluge that comes for homes and cars, Jen Karetnick gives us rich poems layered with ancient flora, with a lush animal kingdom, and the deep well of loss—as if all that emptiness was made possible by myriad forms of life. Organ Language is a book of deep knowing, a book with a love for words and the way they taste in the mouth. It’s a book about sacrifice, a son donating his kidney to a friend. Karetnick investigates her world with tenderness and with the knowledge that she’s embedded in history.
–Anne Marie Macari, author of Amerigun
Jen Karetnick is an extraordinarily prolific and accomplished poet whose body of work reflects both technical mastery and emotional depth. In that vein, her new collection, Organ Language, “wriggl[es]… with urgency,” engaging themes of chronic illness, place, identity, family, food, ecology, and the complexities of modern life with intelligence and grace. With a narrative arc of poems that reflect on her son’s living kidney donation, she demonstrates her dedication to poetry as both an art form and a public good, with a distinctive voice that is at once accessible, layered, and deeply humane. Readers will no doubt consume these poems “with the relief one feels after / issuing an apology to a receptive audience / and tasting the rare substance of atonement.”
–Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Miami-Dade Poet Laureate Emeritus and author of Through the Lens (Texas A&M University Press, 2026).
In Jen Karetnick’s exciting new collection, Organ Language, she proves herself to be a virtuosa of contemporary form—from the golden shovel to the nested villanelle—from the ghazel to the sonetal—Karetnick moves skillfully into ever more musical realms, as if searching for the precise vessel for these poems of the body, human and otherwise. In “Abandoning Breathwork” the human body is expertly linked to the ocarina—a thousands year-old flute and in “Steaming the Wallpaper, 1973’’ a kitchen was a heart, its double arteries shuttered. However, it is this poet’s surreal humor that I admire most as in “Love in the Middle Ages,” where love holds the remote; I / don’t control its selections. Or in “Poet as Kidney Stone,” carving a path where there was none before. These poems feel hard won and wise in the best way. Brava!
–Susan Rich, author of Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds and Blue Atlas
About the Author
Jen Karetnick is the author of 13 collections of poetry, most recently Domiciliary (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, October 2026) and Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award. Her work has won the Press 53 Poem Summer Challenge, Sweet: Lit Poetry Prize, Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received support from more than a dozen residency, fellowship, and grant organizations. The co-founder of SWWIM and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has work in publications including New Ohio Review, North American Review, Pleiades, Plume, Shenadoah, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in fiction from University of Miami. See jkaretnick.com.
