Review of A GATHERING OF LARKS & HABITATION OF WONDER by Abigail Carroll
ut that Carroll, a food historian whose delightful nonfiction book, Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal (Basic Books, 2013) garnered strong reviews, was simply gearing up for her emergence as an extraordinary nature poet in the tradition of, among others, Wordsworth, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Mary Oliver.
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Recent Posts
All Our Sins and Griefs to Bare
The minister is at the Days of Jesus before the girl arrives. He is in his office, waiting. His sermon is written and placed on the pulpit and he waits for the girl to arrive as he has all summer. She comes in the side door and takes the stairs to the basement practice room where she says she is working on her scales. The minister’s office has a large glass wall facing the basement. The girl looks up. The minister is standing at the bank of windows.
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Middlebury Falls
In the black water it is hard to see the body, one more shape floating amid chunks of ice. The railroad trestle looms ahead, the lights of town casting a faint latticework shadow on the water’s surface. There is no moon.
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My Brother’s Guns
My first camping experience. We’re in Vermont over a Columbus Day weekend on the land of our absent friend Vinny. I’m keeping my husband company as the camera on its tripod records the imperceptible nighttime movement of the stars. Peace. Love. Tranquility. Until the mood is shattered by Ron’s passionate certainty that the two young strangers—unexpected intruders we’d encountered on this private land—are our murderers-in-waiting.
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Myriad Selves
The enormous collage, Jheri Now, Curl Later, by L.A. artist Mark Bradford has been a part of the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection for over fifteen years. My love affair and subsequent fixation with Bradford’s work began in the year 2004, during an early iteration of the museum’s First Saturday program
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Five Poems
Waking from a troubled sleep, I turned / and asked my wife what time it was. / Who are you? she asked. Your husband, / I said. I eat grapefruit, repair the washer. / You’re not my husband, she said. Yes, / I am, I said. If you’re my husband, / then who prepares the coffee? I do, I said, / every morning. And the glass bottles:
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Two Poems
And there you were, elegant and engaging, though not / with the people around you, more with the air of the room, / an intimacy between you that I sensed as I watched
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Third Eye of the Inner Light
She leaps up / Ready to answer / Ready to answer / In her session / We see many
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Recasting the Sonnet: Review of Anna Maria Hong’s Age of Glass
The sonnet is inexhaustible. Magnetic, mesmerizing, bewitching, nearly every poet is drawn to the form at some point in their career, whether they long to write the perfect sonnet, the Shakespearean, Petrarchan or Spenserian, or they desire to break the form, queer it, manipulate it, celebrate its mutability; they want to discover what magic can happen within those fourteen lines.
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THE EFFECTS OF ALBRECHT DÜRER’S ETCHING ‘JEROME IN THE WILDERNESS’ ON ACUTE RESIDENTIAL, BEHAVIORAL HEALTH EMPLOYMENT
I found an F. I was at my job, with this kid, a boy, when I stepped on it: a cube, bevel-edged small; a bead: F. Like a lion thing, a thorn. Ouch, I coulda said, woulda, but this boy was watching, and I was wearing my sneaker shoes, their like-Faith cushiony soles. And the boy, no saint, like martyring Jerome’s Lion, he stopped walking when I did. He watched me lift my left foot. The cube thorned into my sneaker’s cushiony sole, like Faith. The boy’s mom is dying, so I Lioned for him: Ha.
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To Understand the Stone
pull from the light three times daily / take in water all at once, then nothing all at once / despise the hands of children / upon the lids of the dead, weigh heavy
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Wanting
He had been fingering his sax mutely from behind the door. “No pretending you forgot something in the living room. No ‘Oh, I’m just coming out to get a glass of water.’” Lilly had gone through these provisions like a lawyer walking through a contract, even asking him to place hand over heart and swear. “But what’s all this?” he’d said, hurt. “Don’t you trust me?” “Not one bit,” she’d retorted. “I know you, Gaurav.”
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