Carr, Julie: Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines

Coffee House Press (paperback, 2010) Publisher Marketing: 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.  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. "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 wri