RAG
Rag
Omnidawn, 2014
LISTED BY LIBRARY JOURNAL‘S BARBARA HOFFERT AS A KEY TITLE OF APRIL 2014
ONE OF THE VOLTA’S BEST BOOKS OF 2014
The question of civic lyric—the possibility of a politics of mourning—runs through this book-length aria-errancy-eros. All the vectors of "rag" are at work: polemical political journal, syncopated turn-of-the-century pop song, menstrual blood, burial shroud, complaint or insult, a cloth to wipe materials with, the barest semblance of clothes, the slang word for woman. The currents of energy running beneath this rag are equally human violence and a sexual force that erupts through fragments of films, fairy tales, real-life news, novels, and memory: a father on fire, a stranger in tears, a prisoner who believes he’s a dog, women in dresses made of food or women refusing to eat, a hit-and-run, a body with no face, or a face with no skin to hang it on, girls in water, women underground. Rag spirals relentlessly forward, picking up bits of recurrent language as it goes, its narratives troubled by stutter, broken by what can’t be told.
READ AN EXCERPT AND AUTHOR COMMENTS IN POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA
REVIEWS
"If you’ve missed Carr’s compelling works, like 100 Notes on Violence, you owe it to yourself not to miss this one—and then you can return to the previous works. Carr’s outspoken lyricism takes us into not-so-blissful domesticity ('—from out of the wretched tide through the heat mothers pass') and, indeed, violence.
In Julie Carr’s new book, Rag, the twin towers of the American empire, fathers and husbands, fall onto the bodies of children and women. Among the normative signs of disaster that constitute everyday life, characters stumble between the privilege of a race without race-- 'To find a color in this boy you had to split him open”—and the ambiguous privilege of gender —'Made to be humiliated and to be adored.' The excavations of 'How power moves when hidden underground' demand an unflinching eye, an attentive ear. Carr moves between narrative and parataxis, prose and poetry, to delineate the violence perpetrated against women and children when the lean-to of race falls over: 'The skin is an illusion of containment…' Rag is a prophetic howl in the wilderness of modernity, a book of accusations and self-recriminations as ancient as human culpability and guilt."
TYRONE WILLIAMS
"This book is a wonder — “Static on the whip of the day” — revealing the fissures and fixtures between the personal and the national, so tender, tough, and astute in its examination of these lively rags on earth it breaks and mends the heart that reads it. In these poems we know the glove and the hand, the ability and inability to move, remove, dress, redress."
ELENI SIKELIANOS
"Rag is gorgeous poems, I tell you, gorge-us. I’m engorged with them, they gorge on me. Embodied, transporting, Rag is what you write on, the makings and achings of pulpy paper, and what you wear when leaking ideas and words as bodily fluids. Rag is irregular rhythm that reinvents how we hear, what we think music is. Brilliant, shardy, delicate and steel-strong, these bloodlines pierce the reader."
MARIA DAMON
“Carr’s book-as-body speaks: now forthrightly, now obliquely, now in anger, now in love, now in security, now in insecurity. Porous, it receives and sends forth news of the conflux of violence and growth that constitutes our political life in its several interpenetrating scales from the neighborhood to the national.”
KARINNE KEITHLEY SYERS FOR BOSTON REVIEW
“Panning and zooming through her story, the narrator assumes the role of director. It’s the sort of delusional choice that we make in our own lives, and thus, one to which we can readily connect. As what the narrator/director refers to as “a movie about my life” (54) unfolds, it reveals a range of influences from pornography to home movies to Hollywood talkies. The director and the audience are made complicit in these scenes, even those which are strictly non-filmic, such as the traffic accident intermittently recalled with filmic details.”
BENJAMIN LANDRY FOR THE RUMPUS
“I don’t know if the reader should look for solutions. Rag is too sumptuous a work of pessimism to give them. That’s a compliment, both on aesthetic and even political grounds. Rag’s pessimism ends by celebrating, in its way, what can’t ever be possessed and denied: death, aging, sustenance, birth, naivety, expression. They can be distorted or used, but not for long. Eventually, the river sweeps away the shore.”
“Carr memorably and lyrically juxtaposes events, calling attention to deliberately cinematic gestures—“I made a movie about my life. The opening shot a polluted river, the closing shot my daughter’s eye”—to flesh out this beautiful, striking collection.”
“If you’ve missed Carr’s compelling works, like 100 Notes on Violence, you owe it to yourself not to miss this one—and then you can return to the previous works. Carr’s outspoken lyricism takes us into not-so-blissful domesticity (“—from out of the wretched tide through the heat mothers pass”) and, indeed, violence.”