If you go to Seren Books' website and join their free book club, you can purchase Imagined Sons for 20% off. Follow this link.
With readings (in chronological order): Seattle, WA; London; Plymouth; Bradford on Avon; Cheltenham; Bristol; Providence, RI; Claremont, NH; Cambridge, MA; Portsmouth; Cardiff; Oxford; Reading; Swansea; Ledbury; Nottingham; Norwich; Sheepwash; Exeter; Leicester; Chichester.
Advance praise for Imagined Sons:
"In Imagined Sons Carrie Etter reflects on the experience of a
birthmother who gave up her son when she was seventeen. In a series of
haunting, psalm-like prose poems of enormous courage and insight, she
describes possible encounters with this son now in his late teens,
expressing how ‘sometimes the melancholy arrives before the
remembering’. The series of ‘Birthmother’s Catechisms’ return to
repeated, harrowing questions that yield different answers at different
moments. This quite extraordinary book by a writer of great imagistic
power and skill leaves a mark
on the reader which is ineradicable. These are poems of the utmost
importance." --Bernard O'Donoghue
"Carrie Etter’s stellar new volume, Imagined Sons, folds the wrenching passion of displaced motherhood
into a fascinating sequence of poems.
Etter writes with intelligence, imagination and style—and not a shred of
sentiment. Each poem packs a profound
surprise as the birthmother’s vision of a son reappears in guises equally
palpable and surreal. Neither a
memoir nor a narrative, the book opens lyric windows to interior experiences,
and it rings with psychological truths.
This gifted poet defines poetry as she wrestles with ambiguity." --Molly Peacock
Reviews of the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice, The Son (Oystercatcher, 2009), which provides the basis for Imagined Sons:
Peter Riley describes The Son as
"quite startling--a serious work about loss through a terrific play of
imaginative resource," while the selectors of the pamphlet choice
remark, "There is something too, about how time moves, or how it
doesn't, in a world akin to that nightmare in which you are running and
running and your legs are jelly and you are getting nowhere. The fact
that the poems in this collection are either prose poems, which can
shuffle on the spot, rather than move along with a sense of narrative,
or catechisms which go back and forth with different responses to the
same question, adds to an overall feeling of being trapped. Indeed,
these poems work by accretion, so the more you read, the more powerful
that feeling becomes."
More positive reviews:
"Carrie Etter's
sparkling, serious beating-out of prose poetry and catechism continues
in a finely judged sequence, grieving and honouring and surprising on
every page. 'It is time' (Etter quotes Celan) 'the stone made an effort
to flower'. And so this fine book, its respect, sadness and subject." --David Morley in Poetry Review
"The "Imagined Sons" poems are short
dream-like stories, which hit exactly the right note, as suppressed
emotion resurfaces in our dreams. There's a surrealist element to these
stories, with a motif of a young man, familiar, but out-of-reach, the
repetition of which builds up a powerful sense of longing.
The
first and last poems - both in the catechism form - link the personal
loss to the public loss of the 9/11 attacks. It's a risk, but it works,
due in part to the understated nature of the poems; in fact, it succeeds
in universalising an experience that might otherwise be intensely
personal." --Alan Baker on his blog, Litterbug
"What impresses me is how complex ideas have been made so enjoyable to
read. The narratives are fluent, intriguing, somewhat surreal, and often
humorous. They seem simple, yet strange, and are deeply affecting. They
mine the deep pit of memory and expectation, and are haunted by what
they don’t know, what isn’t said, what remains lost or unfathomable." --Rob A. MacKenzie, Sphinx 19
"This is a moving collection of texts: some are prosy and some are lyrical. It is not like anything else I have ever read:
The Son evokes
a birthmother's consciousness through two kinds of poems: Imagined
Sons, prose poems which envision the now-grown son and birthmother in a
moment of contact; and Birthmother's Catechisms, in which the same
question--e.g., What day is today?, How did you let him go?--recurs
with changing answers. Moreover, after Al Qaeda's attacks on the US in
2001, the anniversary of the son's birth becomes complicated by the fact
that both occur on September 11th.
Poems in the pamphlet first appeared in Barrow Street, PN Review, The Republic of Letters, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other journals.
