Julie Carr, The Garden

 

            In the end, as at the beginning, I just wanted to think about the woman smoking at the planter’s edge.

 

 

The smoke leaves her mouth, widening like a firth before it enters mine. We breathe, we bathe, we feel each other’s heat. (“Garden”)

The latest collection from Denver poet Julie Carr is the book-length sequence The Garden (Pamenar Press/Essay Press, 2025), a curious structural counterpoint to the assemblage of self-contained and dense lyrics of her UNDERSCORE (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2024) [see my review of such here], a collection that, itself, feels as though it came out more recently than a full year ago. If the poems of UNDERSCORE worked a particular kind of packed density, the seven poem-sequence-sections of The Garden—“Garden,” “Flame,” “War,” “Door and Ladder,” “Blasts,” “Oftening, Over-and-Overing, Aftering” and “The Dancers”—provide an element of ongoingness, a book-length suite of pulled-apart lyric description; a first-person book-length lyric essay composed utilizing elements of prose poem and lyric structures. There’s almost a shared tonal quality, a lyric intimacy and declarative alongside a simultaneous critical distance, one can see that echoes works by such as Erín Moure, Anne Carson, Etel Adnan or Lisa Robertson. Carr writes, early in the opening sequence: “The cities inside our bodies kept our bodies alert—I sat at the café table and my eye / itched. Then my cheek preferred her cheek. I was aging as if a rock growing lichen by a / ruin. The apples fall, pungent and then brown—rot—as all along the hellstrips, child-sized / bathtubs—or coffins—with scarcely a foot between, deter rest.” There’s almost an element of a timeless placement, anchored in a temporal and perpetual present. As the poem continues, further down the same page:

            Because I am allergic to wine, I drink it. From crown to vulva, I am poisoned—a mild intransigence against the self. These once vigorous clouds with their collapsing fibrous folds.

Sections move across the collection, akin to chapters, held together as a single, extended lyric mode of thinking and examining threads of art, desire, family, family history, writing and reading and friends, a pendulum of memory and her immediate present.

            Something was opening and at the same time remained lost, as my friend the playwright wrote. In Boston,
her girls licked their sugar sticks. 

 

            *

 

But in fact, I was interested in them—the angels, the malakim, or “messengers,” those between beings (laying waste to the categories)—as now, back at home, I found my mouth burning as if a fever of the tongue. The machine had crashed to freeze a man’s face, offering a prolonged view of the future, the static future where his generally youthful expression would turn ghastly, mouth agape, pupils like unseeing stones. Meanwhile, in the man’s bedroom where he somewhat was, time was continuing to move in ordinary beats. There, his unastonished voice had said new things, things about budgets and plans that he had in fact said before and would
            say again

Moving through this assemblage, this is a deeply complex layering of subject matter, with different elements moving in and out of focus. At certain point, the book suggests a foundation of family, and family history; at other points, art and writing and friends; of pause, of slowness; of loss, of death and mourning an immediate peer; further on, an underlay of a history of fascism, as it pertains to art, writing and to her own family history. And throughout, repeatedly and occasionally referencing Yoko Ono, as a kind of anchor. “It was all, as we all knew,” she writes, mid-point, “temporary. As Yoko Ono had said, if you carry stones the city will look lighter; if you carry enough stones, eventually the whole city will float away.” The swirls and layerings are brilliantly coherent, held together in amber across such incredible distance, each layer adding to the richness of the book as a unified whole. “With this / attitude of attenuation,” she writes, near the end of the collection, “I’d been reading the letters the now-dead poet had written from her seat on the patio of a rented house on an island.” Or, in the fourth section, writing:

            A lover of the ballet and of books, he’d especially loved a type of book not a lot of other people love—that is, reference books, especially book-length bibliographies, which was strange to thin kabout since those are the books most speedily outdated and that are only useful to people who, by using them to write about their research subjects, are eagerly contributing to their obsolences.

Carr is the author of a whole slew of previous titles, including Mead: An Epithalamion (University of Georgia Press, 2004), Equivocal (Alice James Books, 2007), 100 Notes on Violence (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2010; Omnidawn, 2023), Sarah-Of Fragments and Lines (Coffee House Press, 2010), Rag (Omnidawn, 2014) [see my review of such here], Think Tank (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2015) [see my review of such here], Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Real Life: An Installation (Oakland CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2018) [see my review of such here], as well as the collaborative Climate (with Lisa Olstein; Essay Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. Her author biography also offers this curious tidbit, at the end: “Overflow, a trilogy, will be published sequentially over the next few years.” Is this collection part of that trio of titles? I couldn’t find anything within this particular title to suggest it might be, but it does make me wonder. What is “Overflow”?