Real life An installation

Poet, essayist, and translator Carr (Objects from a Borrowed Confession) asks poetry to be radically capacious in her ambitious 10th collection, to let in all the overlapping forces that constitute "real life." Structured in symphonic movements, Carr's poems make room for data, direct experience, dreams, and the works and ideas of others as expressed in art, literature, and conversation. Among the themes that arise are parenthood, pregnancy (and its various outcomes), violence, poverty, labor, the texture of time as it passes-"All the pains and all the pleasures," as she writes. Far from feeling scattered, 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. As with actual gallery installations, Carr's work invites the audience to consider their own involvement with the space: "You want to enter this room without touching anything. But this is impossible. Your presence, most of all, a discharge." 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. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Art installations dramatically enfold us, conveying a heightened sense of our world, but what if life itself were viewed as one large installation? Carr (100 Notes on Violence) here blends statistics ("in 2013, 1 out of every 30 children in America is without a home"), social commentary ("The candidate does not believe in contraception because he does not believe in sex without procreation (for women anyway")), lists (often 14-line poems with numbered lines), fairy tales (the witches are nowhere near as scary as the politicians), snatches of ordinary life ("In real life it takes a long time to remember what month it is"), and, of course, envisioned installations ("No door through which to enter, no door through which to leave"). 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. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.