Mushrooms, anyone?

Fellow admirers of Williams, cummings, O'Hara, Issa, and/or Basho may share my enjoyment of Harry Gilonis's playful "Forty Fungi," published in the new onedit. I especially appreciate the way Gilonis works among multiple registers.

Natalie Merchant, Troubadour

For a wonderful review of Merchant's current show in New York, read this article, "Songs from an Unrecorded Minstrel," in today's New York Times (you'll need to register to access it). I've been following Merchant since her 10,000 Maniacs days--I even attended a concert she gave at The Greek Theater in L.A. in the mid-90s, which is saying something given that I think I can count the concerts I've attended on my hands. I'd love an album of the reviewed concert--here's hoping a few good recordings make it on YouTube.

Forthcoming Issues

In the next few months, my poems are due to appear in The Rialto, Salamander (US), Stand, and The Warwick Review, while my pamphlet, Yet, will be released by Leafe Press in late February.

The new Selected Poems of Robert Creeley

This excellent review by Susan Stewart (a fine poet herself) makes me wish it were my birthday already, so I could put this book at the top of the list. The review also serves as a thoughtful introduction to the poet's work, for those of you unfamiliar with it.

Obama Takes Iowa

This news will cheer my father--Obama's his favourite presidential candidate. It certainly raises my spirits, though at the moment I'm unsure whether I favour Obama or Edwards.

Short-Lived

Here in Normal, it's still only the second of January, and both my father and sister Sandra are at St Joseph's Hospital in Bloomington. My father has come down with another severe infection, and as his infections have tended to go into his bloodstream quickly, his doctor had him admitted. My mother, Matt, and I saw the ambulance take him away earlier this evening. Sandra has been experiencing an array of problems, including significant weight loss, and it isn't clear whether the cause is her MS or something else. It's been a mixed visit, and I feel awkward about coming back tomorrow with matters at this pass, but there's nothing to be done.

Divining for Starters (Shearsman, 2011)

Launched in London

on 15 February 2011, 7:30 p.m.,

at Swedenborg Hall

In 1999, living in southern California, Carrie Etter began a series of poems focusing on our cultural obsession with creating beginnings and origins—a new day, a new chapter, a fresh start—called Divining for Starters. Twelve years and a move to England later, here are the best poems from that work in progress. They join poems exploring the environment, the erotic, politics, and selfhood. Employing a poetics of consciousness in an array of forms, Divining for Starters ranges widely with poems at once rigorous and delicate. You can buy it from the splendid Foyle's (UK) or The Book Depository for free delivery anywhere else in the world.

"Carrie Etter catches the drift and pushes it lightly into her courses. Lilting now, her courses swerve between the reaches of the American mid-West and the claggy ruts of England, and their erotics are those of skin and fold, of elegant runs and breaks. Carrie Etter's poems give the feel of pleasure; they take unpredictable turns. When all about would be stipulated, Divining for Starters points heedfully to the possible."

--John Wilkinson

"Carrie Etter’s wonderful new book, Divining for Starters, graphs a crop of new forms, swerving from blanks to bliss. Taking the long view of time, Etter writes poems that can at once be a species of call and response (erotics of language), a particulate trace of how one writes, a 'True Story', a physics of animals eating, or a vigil for stillness. She tunes into some kind of new latinate downhome radio, or maps the milky way, post-pastoral in its graphology.

Memory is here, ('fireweed for acres') as are breathing trees, fields across the world - always with a immediacy - a sense that poems are appearing right before our eyes as we eagerly approach 'the entrancing right margin'."

--Lee Ann Brown

Reviews

"Carrie Etter's second collection demonstrates a remarkable ear and intelligence. Combining lyricism and experimentation, Divining for Starters is confident, poised, and at times quite startling."

"...these poems are also finely wrought and immensely sensual--the poet 'fingering my small store of words / held on the tongue' ('Divining for Starters (53)'). Even as closure is endlessly deferred, the poems are gathered together by a careful patterning of sound and sense."

"This is of course not simply the hypnotic dream of a train moving through the night, but the drift of language from any fixed reference point. And it is this carefully controlled and haunting slipperiness that makes Carrie Etter's second collection so extraordinary." 

Sarah Jackson, New Walk

  

"...these lean, fleeting poems operate outside linear time, and outside traditional literary concepts of the start, of progress, and of climax. In this sense, Etter not only subverts our "obsession with beginnings" but gains intimacy with the reader, allowing us to keep pace with her thoughts, and to slip in and out of the atmospheres and sensations she has created."

--Anna Lewis, Magma

"This is a poetry of elegance and grace, of things spoken and unspoken, the known and almost known and the intuited, and it's quite stunning."

--Martin Stannard, Stride

Individual published poems (selected)

A partial list.

Poems are presently forthcoming in The Hardy Review, The Iowa Review, The Jewish Quarterly, Poetry Wales, Shearsman, and Tears in the Fence.


In magazines

Alaska Quarterly Review

"The Son." (16.3-4: 1998, 237)

Angel Exhaust

"Foolish foolish," "The View." (20: Spring 2009, 60-1)

Aufgabe

"New Hampshire's New Bishop," "Treeline," "Divining for Starters (29)." (6: Fall 2006, 107-09)

Barrow Street

"Imagined Sons 2: The Birthmother, The Adoptive Mother & Their Surfer Boy." (Summer 2003, 75)

Bombay Gin

"Paternal," "Sacrificed as the Girl." (35.1: 2009, 152-54)

Cannot Exist

"Seed," "Divining for Starters (54)," "Divining for Starters (57)." (3: 2008, 48-50)

Columbia

"The Honeymoon of Our Attraction." (41: Spring 2005, 128)

Court Green

"(untitled--Dear Paul)." (6: 2009, 115)

Critical Quarterly

"Sissy Jupe's Bedroom." (46.1: April 2004, 39)

Critical Survey

"Short Break." (16.3: 2004, 94)

Free Verse

"Cycle," "The Passage." (11: Winter 2006)

High Chair

"The Reclamation." (11: January-June 2009)

Jacket

"Red Acre," "Infidel's Prayer," "Midnight, Illinois." (22: May 2003)

Leviathan Quarterly

"Horace's Wet Clothes." (7: March 2003, 51)

The Liberal

"Were It Eden." (VI: Sept/Oct 2005, 29)
"Vermilion." (VII: Feb/Mar 2006, 17)
"Collecting the Ridges." (VIII: July/Aug 2006, 19)
"Dream of a Field," "Almandine." (Autumn 2007, 17, 49)

The Los Angeles Review

"The Perfect Box Is Not a Box." (2004)

Meridian

"Almandine," "The Doctrine of Assent." (6: 2000, 54-55)

Metre

"The Trapeze Artist's Dear John Letter," "Almost." (14: 2003, 54-55)
"The Wake." (15: 2004, 11)

Mslexia

"Celestina Sommer, Cause Celebre." (19: 2003, 33)

The New Republic

"The Colony of Us." (228.4613: 16 June 2003, 30)
"Postmarked." (237.4825: 19 Nov 2007, 46)

New Welsh Review

"The Drain's Trickle," "The Long Night." (59: Spring 2003, 59-60)
"The Score," "Crowd of One." (2004?)
"The Dinner Party," "Hardscrabble." (75: Spring 2007, 54)

"A Birthmother's Catechism," "A Birthmother's Catechism," "Painting the Marsh." (83: Spring 2009, 67-9)

"Dolce Vita." (84: Summer 2009, 63)

Noon

"First Summer," "The Love Plot." (7: 2009, 58-9)

Oasis

"Subterfuge for the Unrequitable." (last issue, 2004)

Orange Coast Review (all second publications after first apperances in UK journals)

"The Wake," "Occasional Poem," "Americana, Station by Station." (2006, 99-101)
"San Fernando Valley Love Song," "As If to Say." (2007, 69-70)
"The Letter." (2008, 23)

"Siren," "Vermilion." (2009, 23, 62)

Painted, spoken

"Divining for Starters (53)," "Divining for Starters (56)." 20 (2009).

Poetry Ireland Review

"Convalescence." (85: 2006, 42)
"Birthday." (90: 2007, 22)
"The Meal." (94: Summer 2008, 44-45)

“Homecoming.” (96: 2008, 38-9)

"Solitaries," "Blue Coat," "Melancholia." (99: October 2009, 14-16)

Poetry London

"Over the Thames." (62: Spring 2009, 4)

PN Review

"The Lengthening Winter," "Convicted," "The Day Will Not Rhyme," "Water's Edge," "The Vantage." (155/30.3: Jan-Feb 2004, 55-56)
"Here Comes the Sun," "Outpost," "Occasional Poem." (162/31.4: Mar-Apr 2005, 58)
"Imagined Sons 1: First Son," "Imagined Sons 2: The Birthmother, The Adoptive Mother & Their Surfer Boy," "Imagined Sons 3: At the Fifties Cafe," "Imagined Sons 4: Introducing Myself as His (The First Supermarket Dream)," "Imagined Sons 5: The Friend (Part 1)," "Imagined Sons 6: The Magician," "Imagined Sons 7: The Second Supermarket Dream," "Imagined Sons 8: A British University," "Imagined Sons 9: Seed Corn," "Imagined Sons 10: The Friend (Part 2)," "Imagined Sons 11: Mexico," "Imagined Sons 12: The Courthouse." (175: May/June 2007: 28-30)

Poetry Review

"The Cult of the Eye." (92.4: Winter 2002/3, 16)
"Fin de Siecle," "Pathetic Fallacy as Necessary," "Escalation." (93.2: 2003, 12-14)
"The Taboo," "Land-lock." (93.3: 2003, 14-15)
"Election." (94.3: 2004, 49)
"Biopsy." (97.3: 2007, 51)

Poetry Wales

"Cycling to the World's Edge," "Winter Solstice," "Fence of Pines." (32.4: April 1997, 7-8)
"San Fernando Valley Love Song." (39.1: 2003, 39)
"Days in Mlada Boleslav," "The Assenting Castaway." (2008)

"Arcadia, or Something Like It," "Soporific Red." (44.4: Spring 2009, 10)

Reactions

"Quartet," "Beyond Any Power," "Eurydice," "The Ache," "Into the Rain," "Adoption Birthday," "The Allotment," "Journey by Train." (4: 2003, 55-60)

The Reader

"Early Spring." (26: 2007, 37)

The Republic of Letters

"Imagined Sons 15: The Butcher," "Imagined Sons 16: The Third Supermarket Dream," "Imagined Sons 18: The Pilot," "Imagined Sons 19: The Lone Star State," "Imagined Sons 22: At the Bunch of Grapes," "Imagined Sons 24: A Birthday," "Imagined Sons 25: Only Son," "Imagined Sons 26: The Fourth Supermarket Dream," "Imagined Sons 27: Folk Night," "Imagined Sons 29: Narcissus," "Imagined Sons 30: The Fifth Supermarket Dream," "Imagined Sons 34: The Pound," "Imagined Sons 35: Night Patrols," "Imagined Sons 37: The Sixth Supermarket Dream," "Imagined Sons 41: Drury Lane," "Imagined Sons 49: DJ," "Indian Summer," "Ode to Raggedy Ann," "The Violet Hour." (19: Winter 2008-9, 30-32)

The Rialto

"A Mile from the Cornfield." (55: May 2004, 8)
"Four Hours from the Coast." (59: Midwinter 2005/06, 52)
"Again Tonight, My Sister." (64: 2008, 35)

Roger

"Anniversary" (4: Spring 2009, 31)

Salamander

"Gardens," "I Bear Your Ashes." (5.2: 1998, 4-5)
"The Parents." (6.2: 1999, 59)
"The Prayer, or The Bike Path from Venice Beach to Malibu." (7.2: 2001, 9)
"Outside of Town," "After Class." (8.2: 2003: 42-43)
"Once." (11.2: 2006, 46)
"Leash." (12.2: 2007, 133)
"The First Day of Detasseling," "The Five." (2008)

Seneca Review

"Communion," "Her Answers." (26.1: Spring 1996, 51-52)
"The Articulate, Speechless." (29.1: 1999, 71)
"Kassandra." (32.2: 2002, 50)
"The Name," "The Lovers." (34.2: Fall 2004, 50-2)

Sentence

"Seven and Ten," "The Marriage." (5: 2007, 114-15)

Shearsman

"Divining for Starters (6)," "Divining for Starters (8)," "Divining for Starters (9)," "Divining for Starters (10)," "Divining for Starters (13)." (51: 2002, 19-20)
"Ginger," "Divining for Starters (16)," "Another Obituary for Poetry." (54: Spring 2003, 17-18)
"More Than Bone," "Divining for Starters (17)," "Divining for Starters (18)," "Divining for Starters (19)," "Divining for Starters (21)." (60: Autumn 2004, 18-20)
"The National Muse," "Gathering (1)," "Want," "The Fever Box." (65/66: Winter 2005/6, 58-59)
"Inheritance," "The Final Performance," "Law of Gravity," "Signified." (67/68: Spring/Summer 2006, 55-56)
"The Occupation of Iraq," "My Early Days in the British Academy," "Divining for Starters (36)," "Divining for Starters (42)," "Divining for Starters (43)." (73/74: Winter 2007/08, 5-8)
"McLean County Highway 39," "Divining for Starters (50)," "Divining for Starters (52)." (2008)

Slope

"Estate Management," "Goldenrod, foot by yard," "Under beer and on the humid," "The Return." (11/12: July-October 2001)
"Gingersome," "The Missing Roses," "Divining for Starters (7)." (16: 2002)

Stand

"The Separation," "The Sty." (6.4 and 7.1/181: 200, 29-30)

"A Birthmother's Catechism," "The Day After," "The Last Day of My Visit." (8.4/188: 2009, 18-19)

The Tall Lighthouse Review

"After and Before," "When We." (2006)

Tenth Muse

"The Exquisite Deferral," "Steady as She Goes," "Promised." (12: 2002, 14-15)
"Three Statues," "Unspoken Rather Than Undone," "Chronophobia (5)." (13: 2005, 15-16)
"Retraced," "Divining for Starters (23)," "Turning the Page." (14: 2006, 31-32)

Thumbscrew

"Americana, Station by Station," "Object Lesson, June." (20-21: 2002, 19)

The Times Literary Supplement

"The Daughters of Prospero." (5211: 14 Feb 2003, 7)
"Late Winter, Early Year." (5213: 28 Feb 2003, 11)
"The Review." (5244: 3 Oct 2003, 4)
"Talking with Beccaria." (5264: 20 Feb 2004, 19)
"Seaborne." (5271: 9 Apr 2004, 11)
"The Bonds." (5298: 15 Oct 2004, 6)
"Axes for Crutches." (5312: 21 Jan 2005, 10)
"Citizenship." (7 Oct 2005)
"Magnum Opus," "The World at Dusk." (5373: 24 Mar 2006, 27)
"The Diagnosis." (5417: 26 Jan 2007, 15)
"His Pantoum." (5437: 15 June 2007, 14)
"The War's Fourth Year." (5438: 22 June 2007, 5)
"A Birthmother's Catechism (September 11, 1986)." (5450: 14 Sept 2007, 15)
"David Smith, Wagon II, 1964." (5457: 2 Nov 2007, 31)
"Fear of Lightning." (5463: 14 Dec 2007, 29)
"Pleurisy." (2 May 2008)
"A Birthmother's Catechism (September 11, 2006)." (12 Dec 2008, 8)

"Pursuit, Dublin." (2009)

Under the Radar

"Summer Time," "Hat Box." (4: September 2009, 15-16)

Versal

"Paternal (3)." (7: 2009, 19)

The Warwick Review

"Prescription for the Impatient." (1.2: June 2007, 123)
"Siren." (2.1: March 2008, 44)
"The Tethers." (2008)

"The Reclamation." (3.2: June 2009, 105-6)


In anthologies (by year)

"Hand over Fist," "Okra." GRAND PASSION: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Eds. Suzanne Lummis and Charles Harper Webb. Los Angeles, CA: Red Wind Books, 1995. 45-46

"Her Answers." Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry 1995/1996. Palm Springs, CA: Monitor Book Co., 1997.

"Sacred Ground," "The Birthmother's Handbook." Starting Rumors: America's Next Generation of Writers. Grand Junction, CO: Pinyon Press, 1999. 49-51

"The Articulate, Speechless." Incidental Buildings & Accidental Beauty: An Anthology of Orange County/Long Beach Poets. Huntington Beach, CA: Tebot Bach, 2001. 36.

"The Blue Horses," "Signing the Adoption Papers." Beyond the Valley of Contemporary Poets: 2001 Anthology. Eds. Brendan Constantine and Amelie Frank. VCP Press, 2002. (unpaginated)

"Sunday Afternoon." So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of California Poets. Ed. Paul Suntup. Huntington Beach, CA: Tebot Bach Press, 2003. 63.

"The Trapeze Artist's Dear John Letter." The Forward Book of Poetry 2005. London: Forward/Faber, 2004. 83.

"Drought," "Divorce." New Writing 14. Eds. Lavinia Greenlaw and Helon Habila. London: Granta, 2006. 145-6.

"The Bonds." Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets. Ed. Paul Suntup, Dima Hilal, and Mindy Nettifee. Huntington Beach, CA: Tebot Bach Press, 2006. 48.

"Collecting the Ridges." All That Mighty Heart: London Poems. Ed. Lisa Russ Spaar. University of Virginia Press, 2008.

"The Forecast." Feeling the Pressure: Poetry and Science of Climate Change." Ed. Paul Mundun. Berne, Switzerland: British Council, 2008. 19.

"The Daughters of Prospero." Women's Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English. Eds. Eva Salzman and Amy Wack. Brigend: Seren Books, 2008. 235

Forthcoming Readings, Classes and Talks

--

20 February 2010, "Publishing Your Poetry," The Poetry School, Bath

13 March 2010, "Publishing Your Poetry," The Poetry School, Manchester

NB: Readings for The Tethers will be listed only on that page.

The Tethers (Seren, June 2009)

Winner of the London New Poetry Award 2010, sponsored by Coffee-House Poetry and Cegin Productions, for the best first collection of poetry published in the UK and Ireland in the last year. Judge Daljit Nagra commented, "It’s rare to find a poet having quite so much fun with language and life as Carrie Etter. The poems perform acrobatics with forms as they are driven by the possibilities of words so each piece seems to arrive at its own unexpected and surprised ending. What’s most impressive is Etter’s restless mind that fetches odd allusions or steers off into tangents in a way that always compels us to make the journey. It’s also rare to find a poet who can persistently find joy through suffering with such an assured lightness of touch which defies its lucid surface. A persistently witty and beautifully moving book that is carefully themed and linguistically patterned so that it feels more like the collection of an experienced poet." You can buy it from Foyle's (UK) here or from The Book Depository for free delivery anywhere else in the world.

Readings

Tuesday, 9 June 2009, 7 p.m. London launch! Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW. Come to enjoy some wine and a short reading.

Thursday, 11 June 2009, 8 p.m. Bath launch! Bath Spa University Reading Series, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute, Queen Square, Bath. Reading with Lee Harwood.

Saturday, 20 June 2009. The University of Warwick, Coventry. Day event featuring The Warwick Review in conjunction with the university's alumni day. Claire Crowther and Tiffany Atkinson will also read and talk about their work.

Sunday, 23 August 2009, 7 p.m. Myopic Books Poetry Reading Series, Chicago. Reading with James Shea, author of Star in the Eye (Fence Books, 2008).

Wednesday, 9 September 2009, 4:20 p.m.. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Student Union, Terre Haute, Indiana.

Thursday, 10 September 2009, 6 p.m.. Rachael's Cafe, 300 E. Third St., Bloomington, Indiana.

Tuesday, 15 September 2009. Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Illinois.

Tuesday, 22 September 2009. The Weston-super-Mare Arts Festival, Heritage Cafe, 3 Wadham Street, Weston-super-Mare. Doors open at 7 p.m., dinner begins at 7:30.

Thursday, 24 September 2009. Salisbury Poetry Cafe, Salisbury Arts Centre. The event includes an open mic session.

Friday, 9 and Saturday, 10 October 2009. St Helier, Jersey. A reading on Friday night followed by a workshop on Saturday afternoon.

Monday, 2 November 2009. Alchemy Reading and Performance Series, The Globe Cafe, Prague. I'll also run some writing workshops at The English College in Prague earlier in the day.

Tuesday, 24 November 2009. Marlborough College, Marlborough. A workshop with students, a reading, and a dinner.

Thursday, 3 December 2009, 7:30 p.m. Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. Reading with Vuyelwa Carlin, followed by an open mic.

Thursday, 4 February 2010, 8 p.m. Fire River Poets, Brewhouse Theatre, Taunton. Includes an open mic. £5.

Monday, 8 February 2010, 7 p.m. The University of Plymouth's Peninsula Arts literature series. Reading with Jane Griffiths. £5, concessions £3, students, friends and faculty free.

Monday, 22 February 2010, 8 p.m. The Coffee House Poetry Series at The Troubadour, London. "Escarmouches II: War of Independence" with Alan Jenkins, Roddy Lumsden, and Molly Peacock. Reading and discussion of the poetries of the US and UK, how they interact and differ. £7, concessions £6.

Saturday, 27 February 2010, 4:30 p.m. "New Narratives," Annual Academi Literary Conference, Pontfaen, Wales. Reading with Gillian Clarke, Joe Dunthorne, and Kathryn Gray, followed by question and answer session.

Thursday, 11 March 2010, 8 p.m. International Women's Poetry, Lauderdale House, London. Reading with Annie Freud and Shanta Acharya. £5, £3 concessions.

Thursday, 25 March 2010, 8 p.m. E.g. poetry, The Red Roaster Cafe, Brighton. North American poetry night with Naomi Foyle and Todd Swift, with open mic. £5, concs £4.

Saturday, 3 April 2010, 2-3:30 p.m. The Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, New York City. Reading with Molly Peacock. $8.

For further readings, please see Readings & Events.

Reviews

"The Tethers marks the arrival of an original talent and is surely one of the most ambitious and accomplished first collections in recent years."

Ben Wilkinson, The Times Literary Supplement

"Carrie Etter is an American expatriate, and her poetry is rootless in the best sense: it moves over wide-ranging territory and seems able to make itself at home anywhere. Although The Tethers is her first collection, Etter fully possesses her material," evincing "intelligence and authority."

Paul Batchelor, The Times (22 August 2009)

Carrie Etter's "marvellously pithy and eloquent collection bursts with repressed urges and shudders [...]. There is electricity in these poems, and a tactile, nervous energy. [...] The writing is keen and intimate, tainted with incipient regret, and more than a hint of the terrible power of recollection to distract and distort."

Richard Gwyn, Poetry Wales

"Etter's neat, tight free verse holds back from expressing explicit emotion, letting the reader feel it instead. [...] The best poems try to pinpoint consciousness changing moment by moment, and have their own integrity, as in 'Crowd of One':

For minutes, sometimes hours, a single tap

deftly splits the egg, yolk and white slide out,

the shell closes on air and arcs

in its flight to the bin. Synapses fire palpably.

Regret is elsewhere.

Light suffuses the room,

without any discrete source.

Meditating on this, the reader summons images of fertility, of Annunciation. You have to listen very hard to Etter's subtleties, and then your own answering imagination repays you."

Michele Roberts, The Warwick Review

"There is much to admire in Carrie Etter's The Tethers too. [...] hers is an assured, confident voice. There is a wide variety here in both form and subject matter and I particularly enjoyed the many pieces with a literary flavour; the prose poems, those which put a new spin on relationships and the ones which display flashes of wit. I also admired the range of shapes on the page and the spareness and economy."

Carole Bromley, The North

"In remarking the constancy of water, Etter overturns Catullus' cliché: that the words of women should be written on water, because both are untethered and trustless. Like "Millais' Ophelia" (another fine observational poem), Etter knows the weight of water, its bound composition. In "The Bonds", where the poem's title resonates through multiple discourses from chemistry to "the -ologies of more elusive chemistries", water reflects back history's constancy in mutability, coded through language's adaptable clarity, words like water's surface revealing hidden treasures in their depths. Findings rich and strange arrive with each re-reading."

Sophie Mayer, Delirium's Library blog (10 June 2009)

Remarks

"Many contemporary poets blow away in the gale of nihil and nonsense that life is becoming, but some still try to weather it – Carrie Etter is one of the few to have found strong roots to cling to, and one of the very few in whose lines one can discern the flesh-and-blood figure of a witness wholly alive, alert to the evidence, unsparing but unjudging, getting it down by heart. Sorrowing, glad, graceful, The Tethers is a rich and significant debut."

Glyn Maxwell

"The Tethers is full of highly intelligent, often finely cadenced and in the best sense measured poetry. Carrie Etter deftly fuses accents of modern America and England with a strong sense of the Classics. Nuanced, lyrical, occasionally humorous, these poems reveal time after time an acute sense of 'the rise and fall of what we cannot moor.'"

Robert Crawford

"Terse, wry, discreetly metaphysical, Carrie Etter's poems have the economy of good jokes. She touches her subjects obliquely, with tact: the fury and the mire are acknowledged but held at bay by this art of highly intelligent suggestion. A first book to be remarked."

Rosanna Warren

"There is a fierce Gothic energy behind the determined and deceptively suave tone of these poems. Imaginative in language, setting and character, their humour alone entices us into however fragile a world."

Medbh McGuckian

Sample poems

Poems in The Tethers first appeared or are shortly forthcoming in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Leviathan Quarterly, The Liberal, Meridian, The New Republic, New Welsh Review, New Writing 14, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Stand, Thumbscrew, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Warwick Review.

Pleurisy

At the question
of lung capacity,

the radiator pops
and hisses, a fox

can only be metaphor.
You and that hunk

of metal wheeze.
Sixth floor, Manhattan,

six a.m. winter dark
looks like so much

air to be had.
The fox is stealth.

I almost miss it.

Magnum Opus


Bracken, brambles, and bindweed obscure my castle
that would otherwise gleam in the midday sun.
I hauled the rock hither. I carved it into blocks.
I studied the history of architecture before I set a stone.

Perhaps gleam exaggerates the image.
Perhaps the walls’ pallor appears a sheer white
under the encroaching summer, and the buttresses
bear few but portentous fissures.

The castle also lacks a good bed, which is to say
that once I hack through this derisive vegetation,
I will mount the highest turret and wave my arm in grand sweeps.
I may hire some extras or bribe my friends to stand below.

I may drag the miles of bindweed down the corridors,
up the stairwells, and burn, burn, burn my fortress through.
Then may the pundits come and mourn.
Then may I lie on a kind mattress and dream of bungalows.

Both poems originally appeared in The Times Literary Supplement.