Underscore
Regular price
€19.99
Tender lyric poetry dedicated to two of the poet’s most influential late teachers.
Julie Carr’s most intimate book to date, Underscore, is dedicated to two of Carr’s foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac and tender—at times erotic at other times bitter—these poems remain deeply invested in human relationships amid a life whose backdrop is human suffering.
Reaching toward the “ghost companions in the thicket” and to the beloveds who still “pulse with activity,” Underscore’s sonically intricate poems express a longing for dynamic forces of intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, and what Stark Smith called “overlapping kinespheres.”
Julie Carr’s most intimate book to date, Underscore, is dedicated to two of Carr’s foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac and tender—at times erotic at other times bitter—these poems remain deeply invested in human relationships amid a life whose backdrop is human suffering.
Reaching toward the “ghost companions in the thicket” and to the beloveds who still “pulse with activity,” Underscore’s sonically intricate poems express a longing for dynamic forces of intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, and what Stark Smith called “overlapping kinespheres.”
Julie Carr is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, including Climate, cowritten with Lisa Olstein; Real Life: An Installation; Objects from a Borrowed Confession; Someone Shot My Book; and 100 Notes on Violence. She lives in Denver where she teaches at the University of Colorado and helps run Counterpath, a press bookstore, gallery, and community garden space.