OBJECTS FROM A BORROWED CONFESSION
Objects from a Borrowed Confession
Ahsahta Press, 2017
FEATURED IN “6 POETRY AND PROSE COLLECTIONS FEMINISTS SHOULD READ THIS SUMMER” (MS. MAGAZINE)
With Objects from a Borrowed Confession, poet Julie Carr has undertaken an expansive reexamination, amassing a project written over the last ten years that approaches the subject of confession from within the confession itself. Carr neither mounts an apology on behalf of confessional poets (there is no apology necessary), nor does she offer readers a straightforward critical appraisal of confession in writing itself. Rather, the poet approaches her topic as a theme worthy of consideration, offering fresh insight to what it is about the confessional text that can provide catharsis for one reader just as easily as make another uncomfortable.
REVIEWS
“Objects from a Borrowed Confession vibrates with analyrical fervor, situated intimacy shared, a profound anti-generic communicability running over every edge, terribly beautifully trying to get at something. Having been given an all-but-impossible range of revelation, Julie Carr offers careful and intense imperatives for telling sung strained, estranged, touchingly, with an absolute precision of touch, hands laid on what she hands, all up in all she gives, having put her foot in it, too, dancing words with absolute flavor, preparing a table for pleasure and necessity improvised in contact, turning toward everything in turning toward you.”
FRED MOTEN
“The gifted author of fluid yet edgy prose poems, Carr frequently treats sociopolitical issues (e.g., 100 Notes on Violence) but is here more personal and reflective. The volume opens with letters to an ex-lover’s ex-lover, whom the speaker claims to want to know better. She’s not chasing the past, which is ‘less than the light that falls toward my face. The future, however, is a red fox, running right past me.’ Instead of accumulated stories, she sees us each as a ‘perpetual vanishing,’ with the child’s death that opens the book’s second section shuddering her into the crucial, oft-skimmed present. Is confession a search for forgiveness or recognition? Actually, it seems more about attachment (you’re ‘made something rather than remaining (alone and) nothing.’ VERDICT: A rich meditation on self and others; for all smart readers.”
"EXCITING POETRY FOR SPRING" IN LIBRARY JOURNAL
“True to her interest in confession, Carr writes frankly about her children, who offer many of the book’s most touching and humorous moments. (‘Today my ten year-old daughter told me, while doing some Lady Gaga moves in the kitchen, that she had just two things to look forward to: owning a credit card and sitting in the front seat.’) She also writes of her sexual attraction to men other than her husband, thought it must be said the project never enters the realm of the salacious. Rather, Carr draws the reader close like a confidant; this sensation bolstered by the knowledge she spent a decade compiling the various sections in Objects. . . . The book feels haunted by the spiritual loneliness brought on by the death of a parent; in examining the confessional streak dominating our culture—from song lyrics to Facebook feeds—Carr decides we confess as a testament to our will to live: ‘What I confess to here is also nothing more or less than my aliveness. Why would I need to confess this: I am alive? Because I’m a child who outlives her mother.’”
I am grateful for the choice I recently made to read Julie Carr’s new book, Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta Press). Of it, it could be said that it is itself about confession. But in the process of following this human thesis, Carr has not created a poetry book in the confessional genre, but has given over the contents of a life, as poets and writers do, to the act and idea of confession, with its tandem regret and forgiveness, envy and apology, its Janus head of reflection and visioning. This acupunctural book emerges what we already know in our tissue and chronic pains: “There are, in life, competing passions. And perhaps we choose which ones to live in, or perhaps we only narrate the past” (15). This is, for better or worse, often the case, because, as Carr discloses, “…memory is the only way we know we really were the children we were, and not some other child crawling under a table or dancing on the bed to some other musical score, memory is, in fact, the one method we have for proving the existence of time [. . .]” (84).
MICHAELA MULLIN FOR NOMADIC PRESS
“Haunted by her recently deceased mother’s present absence, and confessing to “nothing more or less than [her own] aliveness,” Carr enacts what Stanley Cavell calls “a lucid waiting”: in Carr’s words, “to look and feel and wait to see, to be seen.””
CASSANDRA CLEGHORN FOR COLORADO REVIEW
“She implicates, but does not resign herself. Perhaps this is the truest, most difficult work of confession: self-indictment without the satisfaction of closure, of consequence or punishment. Unresigned, impelled to explain, to narrate, the confessor-poet speaks out of error in order to be countenanced in, and never retrieved from, their error. Redemption, if it can be called that, takes for its basic architecture this recoiling self-repulsion, this negative space—that is, the opening openness—of the erring I.”
KYLAN RICE FOR GALATEA RESURRECTS 2018
“I am an avid reader of hybrid forms, and I think this might be the most hybrid book that I have yet encountered.”
JULIE MARIE WADE FOR THE RUMPUS
“Carr harks back to questions we ask about our mortality as children. The moment we learn we’re going to die is the moment we’ve constructed a precarious notion of self. She asks us: “How could things be thought of as ‘stopping’ at their edges?””
“Carr has not created a poetry book in the confessional genre, but has given over the contents of a life, as poets and writers do, to the act and idea of confession, with its tandem regret and forgiveness, envy and apology, its Janus head of reflection and visioning. This acupunctural book emerges what we already know in our tissue and chronic pains”
MICHAELA MULLIN FOR NOMADIC PRESS
“Carr is a pyromaniac when it comes to form and genre, torching those limiting structures and allowing instead for the content and concerns of any given piece to necessitate the manner in which it will appear on the page.”