Books

Carr's poems are populated by minotaurs and mermaids, Pegasus and parasites, gods with too many arms, or none at all, and bodies with the ‘ribs inside out’—

Here there is no edge between the glacier and the grass, only a combination of dance and daffodils and an environment suffused with absorption and evaporation, smoke and ether … Carr unfurls a world shot through with the embodied spiritual, a universe numinous and immanent, replete with permeated mediation. She is attuned to what translates between realms, to what ligatures bodies and what lingers at the thresholds of borders formed in the very moment of their transgression. The consciousness in Minotaur, in short, is ecstatic—standing outside itself—with both the religious and sexual valences of the word.

These poems would be religious even without their hosts of avian saints and angels and their spill of Gods because they bind us back—in the radical sense of re + ligare—to a world of inextricable entanglement. The gods here float, as they did for Pound, in the azure air.
— Craig Dworkin

When everything is falling apart personally it helps to write a book that is not coherent but inevitable on an emotional level.

It’s quite possible that the Minotaur poems are a moment of hope before the first and final infidelity that will destroy my hope of a marriage that will survive.

I want: a narrator who is woundable.

I want: a wound so deep you can’t not feel it.

I hope: there is a third term between intelligent despair and berserk rage. Because if I could not put my finger on what was wrong it would go wrong a second time.

I hope: there is a third term between beauty [agency] versus the beautiful [object] and it is love.

I hope: there is a flipover moment and we create it via engagement with the material world.
— Emily Carr

Buy from McSweeney’s

Lily Hoang writes: You might think the magic in Emily Carr’s Name Your Bird Without A Gun would be in its Tarot-generated love story and, sure, that’s sufficiently magical, but the real magic in this book is in its opulent and sultry renderings of nature’s movements, of the world just being its ravishing self, captured in dazzling and nimble verse that will wreck you worse than your petty little heart.

Rachel Pollack explains: Emily Carr’s marvelous shape-shifting, reality-slipping poems truly embody the essence of Tarot—not a hard and fast “prediction” of events but a way to explore the magic—and deep painful reality—of existence. As a “Tarot Romance-in-Verse” the poems can be said to form a narrative, but it is the same narrative as a Tarot reading, one that constantly slips into something else, quantum shifts of something else, or, as Emily puts it, “whole worlds bleeding in dreams of forest—”

Benebell Wen exclaims: This book even seems to have an intrinsic power for bibliomancy!

Working with the Tarot is for me a form of prayer. There’s the same sense of fervency, of checking in with one’s hopes and fears, considering what might, in the best of all possible worlds, be possible—of making space in our overstimulated post-modern lives for faith, and whimsy, and belief because it’s fun, because it’s one of the evolutionary gifts of our genetic legacy, because we can.

The second thing you should know is that because I am a love poet, the formal model of the Tarot is necessary. As a narrative strategy for accommodating the ways our lives misstep and mistake, for celebrating what shouldn’t have happened, what never happened, what might have happened, for crafting a narrative that blows and buoys, saying not this, not this instead of I have it, for sneaking into fiction the lyric’s quest for rest that never (God willing) will be found…

In this instance, the Tarot—which is itself a flawed, mortal document that, like love or life itself, is never read front to back, all of a single clothe—turns the story into an event rather than simply the record of an event. It creates a more vulnerable, fluid space, in which, as the narrative is shuffled and reshuffled, the characters live and learn—but not in a progressive direction.

Using the Tarot to tell a story is a trick borrowed from Proust; as Rivka Galchen explains it: the text offers a series of possible narratives, many of them incompatible, all of them plausible enough, none of them anointed above the others as the definitely real one, all of them, in at least one possible world, true. The Tarot is thus a lyric strategy for, like Scheherazade of the one thousand one nights, deferring conclusions, prolonging suspense, interrogating meaning, and exercising choice.
— Emily Carr

Buy from Spork Press

If ostranenie—to make strange—is the mandate of contemporary poetry, Emily Carr has achieved this both brilliantly and beautifully. Kaleidoscopic in its glimmering slivers, the life she brings us is built of charged familiars slightly and completely changed: the sun turns on its stem; the stallion rolls in a pasture of blue ether. Her poems keeps waking us up into a world sometimes alarming, often unsettling, and always careening until we, too, arrive “delirious & shredded, sailing sideways through the greenly ravished vowels.”
— Cole Swensen

What I find most appealing is that this book seems a living sensibility, as if I can feel its vibrancy in my hands. Its fractured, episodic nature seems to push metaphor toward fresh ways of honoring both the microcosmic and the metaphysical, toward places where "phytoplankton in a raindrop echo" and "love . . . is a sail at the end of the world." The overall effect is expansive and exotic—a "mirage of buoyant polyglot" that remains grounded in immediate sensory and emotive experience, yet channels and extends that experience throughout even the most self-conscious formal innovation. There is a brilliant mind at work here, and an open heart—and the result is strangely beautiful.
— Mark Cox

I don’t know how inspiration happens for you, frankly I don’t know how inspiration happens for me; as a matter of fact, I’ve worked hard not to know what I’m doing so I can do it.

This much I can say: it’s three-dimensional process, proceeding through experience, it involves all seven senses, mostly I have to be moving, on the move, I rarely write about the landscape I’m living in, in fact I don’t write about nature as a rule and I never limit myself to a single landscape or a single place, all of the spaces in which I’ve lived and lots of spaces I’ve never inhabited inform my work, even now, while Indian summer turns too soon to mountain winter I am writing with the Canadian Rockies, and the Monterey Bay, and the Outer Banks, and the cornfield testaments of the Midwest, and with burnt icebergs and flamingoes and wildebeest and feral cats and mammoths eating marigolds and jaguars with their cat eyes flashing and giddyup carousel horses and gods with too many arms and one without any. I prefer not to be located. I prefer not to presume that I can translate a place into the human landscape that is words. I want to be honest about the slippage, about the imaginative freedom it takes to really love a place, to honor all of its peculiar and paradoxical particularness, to give it the opportunity to be an actor (rather than simply acted upon) in the drama that is living, to see the beauty that is there despite our being there.

Why? Because I believe it is possible to make the world we are living in the world we choose to live in rather than the world that, simply, is. Because I believe the basic project of sentient beings is to grow the world. Because this is how we start making decisions that matter.

Sometimes I call the poems that come of this impulse fairytales; other times I call them science fiction. I always call them love poems.
— Emily Carr

Buy from Parlor Press

“Already the unlasting has started,” Emily Carr writes in her fragmented and achingly beautiful how-to (warning/guideline/almanac) for young wives and young poets. Attempting to salvage the “de-articulate, mirror/ the lunatic bride,” Carr quickly makes us aware that her speaker's grip on reality is made of borrowed lace. The result is a series of '36 fits.' Installed by month, each perfectly spare poem talks back to the contemporary canon—Frank Bidart, Nick Flynn, Larry Levis, CD Wright, and about twenty-five others. Yet the strongest poem in the book, “yolk (v.)” happens to be the only “fit” not “after” someone else. When we finally get Carr's unfiltered voice it is naked, long-lined and stunning. Never have I seen a book so much about influence and identity as Directions for Flying. The female speaker, the young wife, fights to carve out her own identity, struggling with love and domesticity, its blessings and pitfalls. Among the chorus of poetic voices, Emily Carr's rises above—supreme, utterly unique, and definitely lasting.
— Sarah Messer

I wrote directions for flying when I was twenty-nothing, had married for love, was pursuing a PhD in the Canadian Rockies, and woke up one morning equal parts ambitious and depressed—consumed by duende in its truest, purest form. At least, I once wrote: “It is an enormous duende that drives the composition of your first book, & your second. You write about a dream of distance/ in which the husband can be/ both far from/ & near to, a woman not considering herself a special receptacle/ for eggs. You refer to yourself in the second person, then the third. There is, you write, no way of saying yes/ again, no way to disappear get out/ of the way, succumb.”

Though I myself have nearly forgotten the woman who wrote this book (Nearly—the poems will not allow me to entirely forget!), I know that at the heart of this book—like all of my work—there is a commitment to transforming the shadowy sides of human nature—shame, grief, guilt, transgression, abortion, eating disorders, infidelity, suicide—into something beautiful. I know that I am doggedly pursuing beyond sense in these poems. Because sense breaks down; we do find ourselves beyond it, and it’s often dangerous and frightening. We need to know how to negotiate this zone, and how to transform it in cases of war and fear and grief into something that won’t simply overwhelm and destroy us.

directions for flying is my first attempt.

Buy from Furniture Press