SARAH — OF FRAGMENTS AND LINES
Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines
Coffee House Press, 2010
A NATIONAL POETRY SERIES WINNER, CHOSEN BY EILEEN MYLES
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.
REVIEWS
“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, NATIONAL POETRY SERIES JUDGE
“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 Carr’s most recent book, Sarah – Of Fragments and Lines, a passerby addresses the poet, remarking on her visible pregnancy: “One of those meaning-of-the-universe-type things,” he says. This book-length sequence situates in uneasy simultaneity, the affliction and death of the poet’s mother from Alzheimer’s disease, and the conception, gestation, and birth of the poet’s child.”
DESALES HARRISON FOR THE VOLTA
“As Carr shuttles among her triple roles as mother, daughter, writer, individual words and phonemes shuttle back and forth like classical melodies.”
REVIEW IN PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (STARRED REVIEW)
“In a present day application of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” Carr approaches the page as a blank canvas in an effort to compose her abstracts in the same manner as painters Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.”
CHRISTOPHER LUNA FOR NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS
“This is a hard book to read not only because the emotions are painful and raw, but because of the sonic density of the poems. Lines like: “Since I lost her I stored her like ore in my form as if later I’d find her, restore her” (36) or “If the soul is in the body a silence/ The silence of flames that don’t sputter don’t burn out” (38); these are lines that pierce the heart. You have to put the book down to allow the sounds to swirl in your mind. You have to put the book down because you have your own losses and your own loves that you fear to lose. It takes incredible courage to share this with the world; these poems have songs to give us as human beings.”
“[Julie Carr’s] lyrical style expresses the complex and often frustrating experience of being human: of constantly thinking, feeling, being, and changing.”
POWELL’S BOOKS
“Weaving like wind among echoes and abstracts, monodies and metaphors, becoming a mother again and losing a mom, Sarah—selected by Eileen Myles for the National Poetry Series—manages to sound like a paean of grief, delivered by a singer suspended between two sides. One is the past, with its ghosts and unkept promises, its desires unfulfilled or else gone astray; the other is the future’s promise of moving on—and of purifying return.”
“Carr’s is clearly a voice of tender lyricism and much intimacy, yet it is never obscure.”
CHRIS PUSATERI FOR LIBRARY JOURNAL
“To write about serious issues without them becoming cliched, to look closely at the feelings attached to powerful life events and how they manifest in our hearts and minds can be incredibly challenging. Carr is not only equal to the task, she also manages to unearth a mental mindfield of emotion in these poems.”
ANGELA STUBBS FOR THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
“But [‘Lines to Scatter’] also quotes the biblical promise of ‘ever and ever’ shining, and Sarah discovers that luminosity in the spaces between pieces and moments—as in the early ‘Daily Abstracts,’ which gathers up clauses of a morning’s waking. ‘Now flare. Now come to this,’ the poem begins. For Carr, fragments can spark a brief transfiguration even as they sustain a daily melancholy.”
SIOBHAN PHILLIPS FOR BOSTON REVIEW
“Birth and death elegantly do their pas de deux as daughter and mother in Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines by Julie Carr who was selected by Eileen Myles for the National Poetry Series. Sarah is the first matriarch in the Torah and her eternity is fused here with our mortality. ‘The body’s a hole through which other bodies move.’ The poems are composed of fragments, lines, and abstracts that leave spaces for the “pillaged language” to make new connections. Lyrically a Contralto, Carr’s music is deeply resounding.”
JEFFREY CYPHERS WRIGHT FOR BROOKLYN RAIL
“Carr formally and linearly structures her manuscript into a typology of grieving. . . . [and] offers a scattering of her own past life to show what is transformed in this decline of her mother and in her own shift into motherhood.”
KASCHA SEMONOVITCH FOR KENYON REVIEW
“Julie Carr manages to humanize the abstractions and wordplay of language poetry, without losing her disciplinary vigor, if you will. The intertwined subjects are her mother’s illness, and her own pregnancy and childbirth. The oppositions would be almost too neat and clean for traditional verse, the ‘closures’ too convenient. But in Carr’s fragments . . . the provisional nature of all our metaphors, our common and uncommon lines of defense, comes through. Whereas conventional poetry seeks to heal the wounds and seal the ruptures, avant-garde poetry takes as its subject the insufficiency of language itself—and in the process makes language itself more pliable and potent.”
HUFFINGTON POST
“I was unprepared for Carr’s music. . . . I find myself drawn in by the sounds and (here halting) rhythm of the poem, by its music, which conveys its meaning. If you read this book straight through, as I found myself doing, there is a vortex-like, physical effect to Carr’s language, which draws a reader in to another’s reality, simultaneously (through the reference to the archetypal matriarch, the Hebrew Sarah) moving us into a time-out-of-time.”
VERSE WISCONSIN
“As [Carr’s} title says, she's working primarily beneath the sentence level in the joints of language, its fine muscles. The context of the book is the speaker's loss of her mother to Alzheimer's as she prepares for the birth of a child; the poems feel inward, mining this liminal zone between loss and new life, creating a stream of consciousness, not as realist illusion but as poetry”