Carrie Olivia Adams, The Book of Marys and Glaciers

 

When she comes to me, I am always alone. A woman alone is extremely herself. A woman alone leaves excess in her wake, every portion too big, in the company of others, she takes up no space, but alone, she is the space. Alone, she watches the dogs of the city, off-leash. She runs towards a foreign language. No longer surrounded by men, she is not mother, not sister, not womb. Not prayers to the fruit of. She is just a woman in blue with a tall glass of wine in a walled city, envying its pigeons. (“The Book of Marys and Glaciers”)

I’m very pleased to see the appearance of a fifth full-length poetry collection by Chicago poet, editor and publicist Carrie Olivia Adams, The Book of Marys and Glaciers (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2026), a title that follows Intervening Absence (Ahsahta Press 2009) [see my review of such here], Forty-One Jane Doe’s (book and DVD, Ahsahta 2013) [see my review of such here], Operating Theater (Buffalo NY: Noctuary Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Be the thing of memory (Flagstaff AZ/Las Vegas NV: Tolsun Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Composed as a trio of extended sequences—“Blockchain,” “The Book of Marys and Glaciers” and “Dust Cover”—The Book of Marys and Glaciers furthers Adams’ lyric explorations through the long thought, the long sentence; stretching a thread through a subject woven and interwoven across a carefully-sustained trajectory. She writes a landscape of depiction, working medieval depictions of the Virgin Mary and of deserts, glaciers. She writes an ecopoetic traversing temporal and geographic space, seeking the bones of what remains, gets stripped away and what is willfully abandoned. She writes on what gets left behind, after all else is taken. As part “IX.” of the title sequence begins: “We’re breathing in the distance, the fires of history. Hell comes to earth and makes itself so at home some days. A pregnant Mary in the desert, throat choked with thirst and fear. Alone and never so alone. The celestial surveillance; a being bound by her own umbilical cord. What’s the difference between a tether and leash?”

Adams is very good at the extended, meditative thread, held through accumulation, one careful and considered moment followed by a further moment. “I wanted to write about Mary,” she writes, as part of the title sequence, “but then I became distracted by the glaciers. The things that glaciers do.” Blending attentions and concerns across detailed, propulsive passages, Adams’ lyric is attentive to not only thought but movement. As with other of her works, there’s a sense of the monologue, the gesture, that one might hear each of these three sequences performed in full on stage, providing a different sense of cadence. The intimacy of her lines are somehow broadened through the possibility of such a performative approach. “I keep running myself disappearance.” she writes, early in the opening sequence. “A pound and a pound. Isn’t this how to lose weight? Is regret still as heavy?”

In the cave, you know your own lies, the stars up your sleeve. A universe made from your own dust. On the floorboards, in the eaves. Even now, I make a cave with my knees. Meanwhile, I grow old in pencil shavings. The chalk of a week of eat & repeat. A season of burial, low tide, replete. My body washed up on a sheet. There was no sleep, then only sleep. Remember sadness immovable. Remember my palm a foreign thing.

                                    What said the strangers when we could not read their lips? (“Dust Cover”)

There are echoes one might compare to Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy’s marybones (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2013) [see my review of such here], as Adams works through her extended articulations around depictions and expectations around women, dipping into and through medieval depictions of the Virgin Mary, writing her own extended prose movements through research and lyric passage, and the prose poem sequence. As she writes to open poem “XI.” of the title sequence:

I don’t want to tell anyone all about me. Mary keeps her silences. Even if no one else does.