Underscore by Julie Carr

“Ask me / for a book of doors that open all at once.” Underscore manifests, stunningly, a movement back and forth — flowing, shuttling, plunging, leaping, folding — between forms of attention and feeling, both delicate and strong, both intricate and vast. One encounters moving focal points in flashes of particularity, and large, elliptical orbits of unified emotional, thematic, political, and conceptual concern. “Out there there are / fragments of voice not yet settled / to ash.” Here are lines of astonishing lucidity, and yet a deep mystery lingers. And here also is great intimacy, not only on the stage of loss, within its framework and lived experience, but also toward precise people and places, lovingly, in affection, attachment, invocation, and elegy. “And to know the sadness is to know the flame.” There is an incredible, beautiful strangeness in this fluid architecture, impossible to pin down, always ebbing and never at rest: “Like / silence spawning music.”

Kevin Holden, author of Pink Noise