Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines

Set to the music of rain, these shattered elegies seek communion in the ethereal place between birth and death.

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.

Publication date: August 17, 2010

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 74 pages

ISBN: 9781566892513

Julie Carr is the author of Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines, Mead: An Epithalamion, selected by Cole Swensen for the University of Georgia Press’s Contemporary Poetry Series Prize, Equivocal (Alice James Books), and 100 Notes on Violence, selected by Rae Armantrout for the Sawtooth Award (Ahsahta Press). Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Nation, A Public Space, and elsewhere. Raised in Massachusetts, she received her MFA at New York University and her PhD at University of California-Berkeley. She is the co-publisher of Counterpath Press, teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and lives in Denver.

“As Carr shuttles among her triple roles as mother, daughter, writer, individual words and phonemes shuttle back and forth like classical melodies.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“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."

—Eileen Myles, National Poetry Series judge

“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.”

—Rain Taxi

“Carr’s is clearly a voice of tender lyricism and much intimacy, yet it is never obscure.”

—Library Journal

“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

“For Carr, fragments can spark a brief transfiguration even as they sustain a daily melancholy.”

—The Boston Review

“Lyrically a Contralto, Carr’s music is deeply resounding.”

—The 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.”

—The Kenyon Review

“Julie Carr manages to humanize the abstractions and wordplay of language poetry, without losing her disciplinary vigor.”

—The Huffington Post

“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