Karen Volkman has expressed interest in the estranging effects of language. As she told the Academy of American Poets, “I believe one of the jobs of poetry is to allow readers to discover different and more complex ways of engaging experience, including the experience of their own inner lives, partly by surprising them into developing new modes of response in their reading, new freedoms. And it’s my hope that pleasure and intense sensation and a shock of strangeness will be part of how they get there.” Volkman has taught at the University of Montana, the University of Alabama, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Chicago. She lives in Missoula, Montana.