Description
Poetry that stands at the crossroads between the real and the supernatural, the actual and the imaginary
In a book rich with formal variety and lyric intensity, Carr takes up economic inequality, gendered violence, losses both personal and national, and the crisis of the body within all of these forces. Real Life is a terrifying book, but one that keeps us close as it moves through the disruptions and eruptions of the real.
Art installations dramatically enfold us, conveying a heightened sense of our world, but what if life itself were viewed as one large installation? . . . All of this yields, as one poem is titled, “The Lived Experience of Social Power” and in fact experience in general. Reading this book feels like living and breathing the life we live and breathe, and Carr manages to make it all compulsively readable. VERDICT: Sharp social and political observation from a poet who does it right.
Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal “Best Fall Poetry Titles”
Carr’s work exists where public and private brush against each other, where, as in real life, conflicting bits of information sometimes reconcile though often do not. The formal tactics are likewise diverse, regularly blurring the border between poetry and prose. . . . Just as installations are distinct as art forms in that they place multiple objects in relation, a central question here regards how a person positions the self amid the forces that shape them and the world. Carr’s poetry, porous and flexible, opens a space through which all of life may pass.
Only a poet can humble us to the gunshot ghost of the America behind its dream. Julie Carr’s resonant genius is at our ears; just look at what’s in your hands now, open it, read it. You will join me in saying, Oh Yes, you have made poetry inseparable from life, thank you for showing us the courage to keep them together. We need this poetry.
CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death
Ordinary life is anything but ordinary. In its daily rhythms a million universes enact themselves in all directions. In Real Life, Julie Carr builds out of essay, poem and fragment this chronicle of in nite dailiness full of what Jean Valentine called “this-world.” As we negotiate and are mediated by multiple languages— intimate, commercial, informational, political—the text runs in simultaneous modes that delineate the condition of the modern mind. Fairy tales meet nancial facts. Somehow in the narrative of sociality we try to remain human.
Kazim Ali, author of Inquisition
Julie Carr’s Real Life: An Installation is a breathtaking feat of imagination, intellect, and empathy. As she writes, “I want to make something from nothing, to ll the empty vault of a national cry” and this book fuels that cry. Real Life is a lapidary mourning song in this age of precarity; a durational epic that exquisitely logs the layered realities that overwhelm and impair us from acting. Carr weaves threads of truths in not only the statistics of gun deaths but in the worlds that her children and artists create as both a space from and against state violence. Throughout, Carr questions how to make real this state violence dematerialized by late capital; how to “cure violence without itself being violent.” Real Life is an impressive poetics of possibilities; her sonnets and imagined installations are blueprints of art-making that disturb, move, and awaken us.
Cathy Park Hong, author of Engine Empire: Poems
Reviews
About the Author
Excerpt
Julie Carr is the author of six books of poetry, including 100 Notes on Violence, RAG, and Think Tank. Carr is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. With Tim Roberts she is the co-founder of Counterpath Press, Counterpath Gallery, and Counterpath Community Garden in Denver.
full speech empty speech
Turns toward a man, trembling and meek. You! See that boy calling for his mother? Say these words: Wonders drone and waters burn, call and call, milk-maker gone! The man is afraid, but he speaks the words, too quietly at first, then louder and louder until he is screaming at the top of his lungs: Wonders drone and waters burn, call and call, milk-maker gone! The boy’s mother: nothing but a broken rocking chair, leaning on its side. Now the witch turns to Lulu, but Lulu refuses, she refuses to say the words that will turn a baby’s bottle into a worm, that will turn a man’s arms into chains.
Bulging eyes, lipless frown, dripping nose, and raised her wand.
But Lulu is not afraid.
Grabs handfuls of cloud, throws them into the witch’s face—
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As tax cuts seen as best hope for jobs
As fires rage in Texas, California
As incarceration blooms data
