Organ Language

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).