is a tale composed of four basic interwoven threads, corresponding to the four-part choral writing of Pierre de la Rue’s service music. The first thread comes from the diaries of a recently murdered priest, Father Andrea Vidal, former secretary to the notorious Father Marcial Maciel. The second thread is the mystery story, a police procedural focusing on the efforts of Denver detective Francesca Fruscella to solve the murder and retrieve Vidal’s diary. The third strand is the story of Father Signelli, a priest sent from the Vatican to “fix” the murder. And the fourth strand explores the best and worst of Catholic culture: art and music created by Catholic artists and sexual abuse by Catholic priests.

Vidal’s narrative is the story of a priest who systematically, sincerely, and hopefully tries to destroy his very self through sex, drinking, and drugs in order to get closer to God. Fruscella’s story is that of a middle-aged, female detective trying to solve a ghastly murder while constantly battling the sexism of the Catholic Church. Signelli’s tale is that of an older career priest who, in doing the bidding of his superiors to fix problems that threaten the order of the Church, has perhaps compromised his own soul. By no means a simple narrative of wicked priests, this is a story of men who desperately want to believe, as well as a story of what this belief might shelter and cost.

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Noah Eli Gordon's latest poetry collection, (Solid Objects) was included in The New York Times list on April 3. From the NYT: "The prose poems that make up the bulk of this slim book, all of them called “The Problem,” resemble absurdist flash fiction, disrupting reality through juxtaposition and non sequitur."

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Approaching the practices of reading and writing from a feminist perspective, Julie Carr asks vital ethical questions about the role of poetry—and of art in general—in a violent culture. She addresses issues such as the art of listening, the body and the avant-garde, gun violence, police brutality, reading and protest, and feminist responses to war in essays that are lucid, inventive, and informed by a life lived with poetry. Essays on poets Lorine Niedecker, Jean Valentine, Anne Carson, Lyn Hejinian, and Lisa Robertson detail some of the political, emotional, and spiritual work of these forerunners. A former dancer, Carr also takes up question of text, dance, performance, and race in an essay on the work of choreographer, writer, and visual artist Ralph Lemon and poet Fred Moten.

Carr’s essays in push past familiar boundaries between the personal/confessional and experimental/conceptual strains in American poetry. Pressing philosophical inquiries into the nature of gender, motherhood, fear, the body, and violence up against readings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets, she asks us to consider the political and affective work of poetry in a range of contexts. Carr reports on her own practices, examining her concerns for research and narrative against her investment in lyric, as well as her history as a dancer and her work as curator and publisher. Carr’s breadth of inquiry moves well beyond the page, yet remains grounded in languages possibilities

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

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Julie Carr's new work, , was recently published by Ahsahta Press.

From the Publisher's Page

With Objects from a Borrowed Confession, poet Julie Carr has undertaken an expansive reexamination, amassing a project written over the last ten years that approaches the subject of confession from within the confession itself. Carr neither mounts an apology on behalf of confessional poets (there is no apology necessary), nor does she offer readers a straightforward critical appraisal of confession in writing itself. Rather, the poet approaches her topic as a theme worthy of consideration, offering fresh insight to what it is about the confessional text that can provide catharsis for one reader just as easily as make another uncomfortable.

A one-sided epistolary novella whose speaker writes to an ex-lover’s ex-lover begins this volume, and Carr charges these unanswered, unanswerable letters with inquiries that permeate the book: How do we understand grief, obsession, the very nature of forgiveness? Why confess? Whom does my confession benefit? For whom do I intend it? Carr’s lyrical prose guides the reader through these questions by way of inhabiting shared spaces and experiences. The poet’s dexterous handling of these shifts between essay, epistolary, poem, and memoir, allows each movement within the book its own unique music––melodies, which, taken in whole, create intoxicating harmonies for the attentive listener. The result is a book emotionally complex and intellectually thrilling, brimming with crystalline prose and formal expertise from one of contemporary poetry’s most distinct voices. 

“Objects from a Borrowed Confession vibrate/s with analyrical fervor, situated intimacy shared, a profound anti-generic communicability running over every edge, terribly beautifully trying to get at something. Having been given an all-but-impossible range of revelation, Julie Carr offers careful and intense imperatives for telling sung strained, estranged, touchingly, with an absolute precision of touch, hands laid on what she hands, all up in all she gives, having put her foot in it, too, dancing words with absolute flavor, preparing a table for pleasure and necessity improvised in contact, turning toward everything in turning toward you.” —Fred Moten

with Electric Literature

from Ms. Magazine

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Walking through his own house at night, a twelve-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew.

The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you’d rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his little brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them . . . at terrible cost.

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What do you do when your dreams come true? When you were twelve, camping out in the back yard, you told your best friend that if he could draw a superhero good enough, you’d give him the perfect words to say. And then it didn’t just happen, there’s even action figures now. Your comic book is on every shelf. And you live beside your best friend again. Your kids even play together, with those action figures. Watch them on the lawn, there. Take a snapshot, and then look over their heads, over the tops of the houses, past the city, past the world itself. Look at all the stars, at all the adventures waiting out there. What do you do when all your dreams come true? You close your eyes, so the dream can last. You close your eyes and you roll your hands into fists, and you try to hold on.

Illustrated by Aaron Lovett

Letters by Sulac, Kathryn S. Renta and Joshua Viola

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