Lucifer

Product Description Richard Carr's Lucifer is the devil everybody knows. Mick the Bastard and Juliet are frighteningly familiar, too. Lyric reflections on wild, willful abandon, Carr's latest sequence limns a dark, doomed life with only a hint of the silver believers pray lines blue-black storm clouds when they loom overhead. — Brian Beatty, author of Duck! and host of You Are Hear

Lucifer is not a dark companion. He is the dark companion, a useless blanket keeping you only more wet in the rain—yet you won't take it off. It's a cloak, after all, an illusion of protection that sometimes we need, if only because it's so familiar. With Richard Carr's Lucifer, we peel the blanket off and see it for what it is—in Carr's case, brilliance. Dark, dangerously beautiful, savage in its salvation. — Paula J. Lambert, author of The Sudden Seduction of Gravity and The Guilt That Gathers

In Lucifer, Richard Carr achieves what both any good fiction writer and any good poet strive to. He draws us into a sharply defined world and makes us care about its inhabitants, doing so through language that is true to that world yet transcendent: "Juliet's shirt buttons are fragile, holy wafers. / I take one in my mouth, press it with my tongue tip, / pull the shirt taut like a white kite, / and let it go." Lucifer challenges us to love the unlovable and commit the unthinkable, all while it sings in our ears. — Darci Schummer, prize winning poet and fiction writer About the Author Richard Carr's writing has appeared in Poetry East, Exquisite Corpse, New Letters, Painted Bride Quarterly and many other journals. His poetry collections are Grave Reading (Unsolicited Press 2014), Lucifer (Logan House 2013), Dead Wendy (FutureCycle Press 2012), Imperfect Prayers (Steel Toe Books 2012), One Sleeve (Evening Street Press 2011), Ace (Word Works Books 2009), Street Portraits (The Backwaters Press 2008), Honey (Gival Press 2008), and Mister Martini (University of North Texas Press 2008). His chapbooks include Butterfly and Nothingness (Mudlark 2004) and Letters from North Prospect (Frank Cat Press 1997). His honors include the Holland Prize for Lucifer, the FutureCycle Poetry Prize for Dead Wendy, the Washington Prize for Ace, the Gival Press Poetry Award for Honey, and the Vassar Miller Prize for Mister Martini. A former systems analyst, web designer, and tavern manager, he currently teaches English in Minneapolis.