THINK TANK
Think Tank
Solid Objects, 2015
"It’s still dark / Then, a door," begins Julie Carr's beautiful Think Tank. We are invited to step through it, into a space both interstitial and marked, always, with the parts that don't adhere: "streaks of water between panes of glass," "shores . . . [like] garnets, as vital as they are coarse," a "[p]inching and elliptical grammar . . . slightly tipped at the horizon." This is where pleasure lies—in its tilted reality and luminous curiosity that resembles, so much, childhood imaginaries of loss, landscape and becoming. In connecting to these other qualities of consciousness, Carr opens apertures and seams of different kinds, in a complex, delicate, durational writing that could be both things: the mouth that releases its load of blood when it opens to speak, or something else—a way to get to the next part of life. "At the doorway: endlessness," Carr writes. And we follow her gaze until it breaks: "glinting and wet."
BHANU KAPIL
READ EXCERPTS FROM THINK TANK ON POETS.ORG
READ MORE EXCERPTS IN CONJUNCTIONS
LISTEN TO A CONVERSATION BETWEEN JULIE CARR AND RACHEL ZUCKER ABOUT THINK TANK ON COMMONPLACE
REVIEWS
"This is a volume of extraordinary discipline, cerebral yet appealing, loose and playful... Some poetry books are meant to be read slowly and a second time; this is one of them."
JOHNNY PAYNE FOR CLEAVER MAGAZINE
A meeting of one poet’s many minds and/or a poem-film of a brain as both a bottle and its contents, its own double feature. See also Dickinson’s “If wrecked upon the Shoal of Thought” or this, from Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed: “To know how far reality is open to our dreams would be to know how far reality is confined by our dreams of it.” Not a “project,” but rather a series of projections that throws great light on a life, Think Tank is real-to-reel-and-back-again writing, an actual reverie, a thing of thought and song.
GRAHAM FOUST
Carr’s writing has always been concerned with questions, such as those about violence and terrorism in 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta Press, 2009). In Think Tank, the interrogation abides a structure which intimates that there is less at stake, less urgency. But though this book feels softer, its scope, as its epigraph suggests, is wide to the point of an unknown horizon, and in this endlessness, Carr asks: “Who’s breathing whom here?” (51).
MICHAELA MULLIN FOR NOMADIC PRESS
“Think Tank sloshes. Its poems are many things best understood as one thing. The elements of Think Tank find commonality in their manifold qualities of containment. Although the thought seemed reductive to me at first, and again as I declare it, Think Tank is indeed a tank of think, for think.”
JOHN TREFRY FOR ENTROPY MAGAZINE
“Reading Carr’s new collection is like being a child in a long corridor of locked doors, jiggling handles. It is in Carr’s axial lines that we, the reader, reach the door that flings itself open onto ’These aimless realms of privacy.’”
WHITNEY KERUTIS FOR THE VOLTA BLOG
“From the body, Carr gives back a novel text in an act more nuanced than ventriloquism: Think Tank dialogs in the ear-marked pages of ‘literature’ in a style that mirrors the craft of folksong and of jazz; to expand the role of inherited ideas and exponents of style; to take input and produce an output worthy of praising and pushing the boundaries of the art(form).”
DOUGLAS PICCINNINI FOR THE VOLTA BLOG
“As Carr’s book demonstrates, growing into and through adulthood necessarily demands the assumption of new obligations and the divestment of the old as we move through the grand accumulation of living. Eschewing isolation, the speaker’s roles are distinct yet blended: Mother, daughter, wife. Philosopher, teacher, citizen. Part search, part adventure, part excavation, Think Tank is an interstitial cacophony and a chorus, as Carr writes, “Suspended between two worlds superimposed one upon the other.””
LAURIE SAURBORN FOR AMERICAN MIRCOREVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS
“Many poets have written on new parenthood in a manner that feels anecdotal (“remember the time when we . . . ?”), but Carr’s temperament leads her away from anecdote and toward myth; away from collections of factual detail and toward an evocation of the frightening gravity and mystery that life takes on in a time of dislocating change.”
JAY AQUINAS THOMPSON FOR KENYON REVIEW
“Think Tank, Julie Carr’s sixth book, is as much a repository for policy as it is a receptacle for recreational submerging. It’s interested in the procedures of living in a way that’s so basic it’s hard to see and write about, where the work of a think tank is to step back to think about how best to participate, and what kinds of structure that participation needs.”
“In many ways, the poetic body and the physical body are the same: a poetic violation is a trauma just like a physical violation, though the method and the context differ. How can one make and live poetry without violation? How can the honoring of the (many) selves be made welcome in innovative poetics? Julie Carr’s Think Tank exceeds reductive parameters of allowable speech through complicating the concepts of identity and voice. It’s refreshing, fascinating, and endlessly inspiring.”
JAY BESEMER FOR WOODLAND PATTERN
“Carr skillfully presents the sublime alongside the grotesque, evoking the inherent instability of the various definitions of beauty that circulate within culture. She suggests that although our aesthetic judgements arise out of a deeply problematic past, rife with violence and iniquity, these values remain inherently changeable.”
KRISTINA MARIE DARLING FOR COLORADO REVIEW
“For Julie Carr, poetry is just such an activated, activist art—an ethical technology. The enduring lynchpin of her work is engagement. The good life is an engaged life, a life that attends, that applies itself. The good life is a making-doing that imbricates the self and its body among other bodied selves and objects. The poet of the good life, the poet as ethicist, lives entwined, enmeshed, as essentially distributed as possible, abroad in the world so as to be inextricable from it.”