About the Book
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."
About the Author :
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.
Review :
"The poems hold both the tension of the pandemic-era lockdowns and an outreach, composing poems for an array of friends and friendships, including two important friends and mentors who died during the first year of Covid-19 pandemic lockdown: American dancer Nancy Stark Smith (1952-2020) and poet Jean Valentine (1934-2020), to whom the collection is dedicated. . . . The poems in UNDERSCORE offer a halt, a halt, a hush; a carved, sharp sequence of accumulating lines set across an incredible rhythm and pacing that propels, pivots and swings."
"'Underscore' refers to an improvisational dance practice – one body, one style, moving in different manners, each movement or series of movements existing as its own moment, breaking stillness. . . . 'Underscore' refers perhaps as well to what a poem can do to an emotional (and, or, comma, slash) spiritual state by centering upon it. . . . In this magnificent flux present in the words and between them (and the placement of these words on the page is worth the effort of finding and holding the book), [Carr] ensures that we roll from one part of our feet to others, leap toward other places, and leave nothing of us behind as we pass into other forms of life, floating as if carried by them."
"'Ask me / for a book of doors that open all at once.' Underscore manifests, stunningly, a movement back and forth—flowing, shuttling, plunging, leaping, folding—between forms of attention and feeling, both delicate and strong, both intricate and vast. One encounters moving focal points in flashes of particularity, and large, elliptical orbits of unified emotional, thematic, political, and conceptual concern. 'Out there there are / fragments of voice not yet settled / to ash.' Here are lines of astonishing lucidity, and yet a deep mystery lingers within unravelings and crystallizations miraculously deft and gorgeously slipping. And here also is great intimacy, not only on the stage of loss, within its framework and lived experience, but also toward precise people and places, lovingly, in affection, attachment, invocation, and elegy. At times one might feel Dickinson, at times, Woolf, glass panes, shadows, the hanging cloths of Eva Hesse—an arcing topology and groundswell of care, for children, mothers, phantoms, friends—'... to scan the names for names I know / no more mere than they are massive / like the weight of dust-crowned / loam.' Arid and vegetal, contained and expansive, optical and opaque, it just sings. There is an incredible, beautiful strangeness in this fluid architecture, impossible to pin down, always ebbing and never at rest: 'Like / silence spawning music.'"
"Like a murmuration of starlings whose contortions hover and careen before escape, Carr’s Underscore is an ambient and pointillistic deep saturation of the economies of twilight. In these tapering hours when we release the screwdriver from our grip, these words emerge as beads of sweat broken from a fever. I trust the perversity of these poems because it is a perversity so elemental that listens to what it should not be listening to: under floorboards, the punished, the yeast. In a necessary poetics of the ill-equipped, this book speaks to the violence and ultimate limits of use and to somatic transmissions only possible in disintegration and power out. As a silhouettist of language, Carr’s words gather in the thousand dots from disparate frequencies, concentrating them so momentarily yet so sharply until the moving edges cut shadows into the land, out of something like the human."
"The underscore—a line drawn beneath, an emphasis on top of which we move, tremble, sweat, and want. A plank we walk, both towards and away from one another, always simultaneously. Between the inbreath and the outbreath, curling in and furling out: we dance in wide absences drenched in light that is the shifting shape of our teachers. Carr’s stunning Underscore reminds us that desire is a form of participation."
"If the race has already begun to see which poetries might outwit AI in the coming years, perhaps a poetics of hyper-personal address might endure the longest, might be just the tech needed to code into the real. Carr’s Underscore is clusters of code-cracking poems aimed at demonstrating how the implicit people of our lives become the explicit, the actual stakes. In this, Carr’s eighth book of poetry, social-psychic dissolution is momentarily snatched from the jaws of The Shredder we call American Society. And with social crises nipping at the edges of these intricate, lush poems, Carr adeptly ignores, or dodges, or straight up smacks the dizzy head of Imperium—to our delight."
