REAL LIFE: AN INSTALLATION
Real Life: An Installation
Omnidawn, 2018
BEST POETRY BOOKS & POETRY COLLECTIONS OF 2018, ENTROPY MAG
In a book rich with formal variety and lyric intensity, Carr takes up economic inequality, gendered violence, losses both personal and national, and the crisis of the body within all of these forces. Real Life is a terrifying book, but one that keeps us close as it moves through the disruptions and eruptions of the real.
REVIEWS
“Impaled on the horns of the body and mind, Carr cannot close “the gap…/between what [she] want[s] and what [she] know[s].” She is all too aware that, from the “outside,” she lives and enjoys the privileges of a “model” American life: a middle class married professional white mother. Installed in that life, she embraces and rebels, accepts and defies it. Is Real Life: An Installation a powerful exoneration or a full-blooded confession? Yes.”
TYRONE WILLIAMS FOR POETRY FOUNDATION
“With remarkable skill and compassion, Carr has created an installation that holds a mirror to this culture, and its apparatus for generating, again and again, that “sorrowful laughter,” the sound of “a world shifting away.””
KRISTINA MARIE DARLING FOR KENYON REVIEW
“This collection of Julie Carr’s poems is critical to any reader that cares about the climate of the 21st century. Her interweaving of dramatic story with what might be seen as a more poetic “commentary” is nearly unprecedented as an aesthetic by which to get the words onto the page.”
“it’s through the installations themselves that [Carr] is able to suspend time, to transform our perception of art as it clashes with real life, to create an instance of constructed life, through language that stays (as an installation normally does not).”
KIMBERLY GREY FOR ON THE SEAWALL
“Carr’s poetry, porous and flexible, opens a space through which all of life may pass.”