Sarah - Of Fragments and Lines

A National Poetry Series winner, chosen by Eileen Myles. Set to the music of rain, these shattered elegies seek communion in the ethereal place between birth and death. “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 “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 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.

Julie Carr is the author of 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, The 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.