Sarah - Of Fragments and Lines
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
Sarah - Of Fragments and Lines
By (Author) Julie Carr
Coffee House Press
Coffee House Press
23rd November 2010
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Poetry by individual poets
811.6
Physical Properties
Paperback
74
Width 152mm, Height 228mm
141g
Description
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 Carrs hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author speaka whispering that enables us into its world . . . a masterfully sutured journey, painfully useful. SarahOf 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 Carrs harrowing new book is composed of a complex music of grief and fragmentation that illuminates the fragile distance between mothers and daughters. To read SarahOf 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 mothers battle with Alzheimers and a childs 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 Id find her, restore her, giving voice to the longing that accompanies lifes most profound losses and its most anticipated arrivals.
Reviews
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 Carrs 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 Carrs 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)
Author Bio
Julie Carr is the author of Mead: An Epithalamion, selected by Cole Swensen for the University of Georgia Presss 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 University and her PhD at University of California-Berkeley. She is the co-publisher of Counterpath Press, teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and lives in Denver.
