Mead

With 'face upon face rising out of the,' Julie Carr's stunning book-length epithalamion cracks open marriage and motherhood as if they were geodes, exposing the dazzle within, 'a spark / in the draft of the burning.' Its fierce lyricism both fractures and binds together, so that the outside and the inside take hands. This is a song well worth hearing again and again: 'Now all ring you ah.'

* author of Otherhood: Poems *

Carr illuminates the marriage of the inner and outer worlds, often taking detours from sense and always taking them to interesting places, always landing somewhere deeply felt.

* author of Goest *

Mead charts the vicissitudes of a marriage or a mind or the sentence. Change and flux govern each turn in this collection of domestic moments. Carr emerges us so completely into the dailiness of this form that even when it is threatened by the fantasy of dissolution we understand fantasy to be just another interruption defining the familial self. The representational language that governs the text becomes the necessary choice to prevent the obliteration of that self.

* author of Plot *

Mead's taut and intensely felt family romance stands in contrast to any easy family mythology imbedded in American culture.

Carr conducts poetic form as if it were choreography. . . . [Mead] radiates with a clean beauty.

Carr is fantastic at pushing language to the edge of everyday usage, disrupting it just enough to make us see it anew, yet still follow what she is saying. . . . Mead is an astonishing, accomplished work that consistently surprised and delighted me.

In Mead, 'engender' is an anagram for 'endanger,' and the poet demonstrates that to be fearless is to inhabit one's fear with ardor. Be prepared, then, for this fierce and loving poetry. Carr avers that 'measure becomes 'direction, determined. Its function being to conjoin and so dissolve opposing forces.' Mead wrestles with these forces, taut on the continuum between terror and curiosity. The renewed proportion of Carr's measure makes a golden tightrope on which I gladly walk.

* author of Apprehend