Sarah - Of Fragments and Lines

by Julie Carr

Overview

A National Poetry Series winner, chosen by Eileen Myles.

Set to the music of rain, these shattered elegies seek communion in the ethereal place between birth and death.

“As a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carr’s hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author speak—a whispering that enables us into its world . . . a masterfully sutured journey, painfully useful. Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines is a book I know I will return to. And urge it on my friends who have lives too and write in them.”—Eileen Myles

“Julie Carr’s harrowing new book is composed of a complex music of grief and fragmentation that illuminates the fragile distance between mothers and daughters. To read Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines is to recall once again that memory might just be the singular attribute of being human and that there can be no poetics of daily life that does not confront loss. Such is the domain of love; such is the vocation of poetry.”—Peter Gizzi

In the wake of a mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s and a child’s impending birth, Julie Carr gathers the shards of both mourning and joy to give readers poems that encompass it all: “Zebra and xylophone cyclone and sorrow.” Here she says, “Since I lost her I stored her like ore in my / form as if later I’d find her, restore her,” giving voice to the longing that accompanies life’s most profound losses and its most anticipated arrivals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566892513
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	08/17/2010
Series:	National Poetry Series
Pages:	74
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Julie Carr is the author of Mead: An Epithalamion, selected by Cole Swensen for the Universityof Georgia Press’s Contemporary Poetry Series Prize, Equivocal (Alice James Books), and 100 Notes on Violence, selected by Rae Armantrout for the Sawtooth Award (Ahsahta Press). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, The Nation, A Public Space, and elsewhere. Raised in Massachusetts, she received her MFA at New York Universityand her PhD at Universityof California-Berkeley. She is the co-publisher of Counterpath Press, teaches at the Universityof Colorado at Boulder, and lives in Denver.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“As Carr shuttles among her triple roles as mother, daughter, writer, individual words and phonemes shuttle back and forth like classical melodies. . . . Repetitions and echoes owe something to Gertrude Stein, but Carr’s earnest music never simply repeats earlier experiment. Rather, her spare songlike pages . . . portray the strong contrary pulls in her divided mind.”—Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

A mother’s steep mental decline, a poet’s pregnancy, a daughter’s birth: these events resonate throughout the taut fourth collection from Carr (Equivocal). Yet Carr’s real achievement, in these spare pages, has less to do with story, autobiography, psychological grief, or emotional growth than with the way her lines and phrases sound: as her baby-to-be grows, as her mother loses her memories, as Carr herself shuttles among her triple roles as mother, daughter, writer, individual words and phonemes shuttle back and forth like classical melodies, almost (but not quite) reduced to pure sound. “A word turns in a thought while a foot’s in the, the literate belly: timed, measured kissed./ Mired in rhyme, I rise and am two,” Carr writes in “Grief Abstracts,” and her monostichs, her blocks of short prose, stand always on the edge of abstraction--albeit she never falls in. Repetitions and echoes owe something to Gertrude Stein, but Carr’s earnest music never simply repeats earlier experiment. Rather, her spare songlike pages, interspersed with blocks of clearer prose, portray the strong contrary pulls in her divided mind: “The idea, which she knows to be illogic... is that if she is pregnant the baby will keep her mother alive.” (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

“As Carr shuttles among her triple roles as mother, daughter, writer, individual words and phonemes shuttle back and forth like classical melodies. . . . Repetitions and echoes owe something to Gertrude Stein, but Carr’s earnest music never simply repeats earlier experiment. Rather, her spare songlike pages . . . portray the strong contrary pulls in her divided mind.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“As Carr shuttles among her triple roles as mother, daughter, writer, individual words and phonemes shuttle back and forth like classical melodies. . . . Repetitions and echoes owe something to Gertrude Stein, but Carr’s earnest music never simply repeats earlier experiment. Rather, her spare songlike pages . . . portray the strong contrary pulls in her divided mind.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

As a piece derived from a unified whole, a fragment suggests a tiny shard of a story that must stand on its own and, in doing so, devise a new context for itself. In her newest book, Carr (Equivocal) deals with several threads of the personal: pregnancy, birth, death, and grieving. These events play out not as some progression that leads toward an inevitable resolution but as a transubstantiation of sorts, where the book's various fragments, lines, and abstracts occur simultaneously, with each assuming characteristics of the others. If such modes of composition demonstrate, as Carr writes, "no love for/ myself or for the narrative," it is only because our humanity pulls us in contradictory directions. For Carr, Sarah—the mother lost to Alzheimer's as Carr herself is expecting a baby—is the tension that exists between the remains of a remembered future and a past that hasn't happened yet. VERDICT This book will appeal to those for whom personal history is not a tidy set of stories but a site of contingency, struggle, and change.—Chris Pusateri, Jefferson Cty. P.L., Lakewood, CO

Library Journal