Underscore
Underscore
Omnidawn Press, 2024
Julie Carr’s deeply intimate collection, Underscore, is dedicated to two of Carr’s foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac, tender, and at times erotic or bitter, these poems remain deeply invested in human relationships amid a life whose backdrop is human suffering.
Reaching toward the “ghost companions in the thicket” and to the beloveds who still “pulse with activity,” Underscore’s sonically intricate poems express a longing for dynamic forces of intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, and what Stark Smith called “overlapping kinespheres.”
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“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
"The underscore—a line drawn beneath, an emphasis on top of which we move, tremble, sweat, and want. A plank we walk, both towards and away from one another, always simultaneously. Between the inbreath and the outbreath, curling in and furling out: we dance in wide absences drenched in light that is the shifting shape of our teachers. Julie Carr’s stunning Underscore reminds us that desire is a form of participation.
Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Slab
If the race has already begun to see which poetries might outwit AI in the coming years, perhaps a poetics of hyper-personal address might endure the longest, might be just the tech needed to code into the real. Julie Carr’s Underscore is clusters of code-cracking poems aimed at demonstrating how the implicit people of our lives become the explicit, the actual stakes. In this, Carr’s 8th book of poetry, social-psychic dissolution is momentarily snatched from the jaws of The Shredder we call American Society. And with social crises nipping at the edges of these intricate, lush poems, Carr adeptly ignores, or dodges, or straight up smacks the dizzy head of Imperium—to our delight.
Rodrigo Toscano, author of The Charm and the Dread
Like a murmuration of starlings whose contortions hover and careen before escape, Julie Carr’s Underscore is an ambient & pointillistic deep saturation of the economies of twilight. In these tapering hours when we release the screwdriver from our grip, these words emerge as beads of sweat broken from a fever.
—Valerie Hsiung, author of The Naif