One Sleeve

Richard Carr's brilliant fifth book, One Sleeve, collects all the resonating themes of his earlier work, turbocharges them, and demands that the reader, stripped of all pretense, illusion, and self-pity, face the human condition of our time. From these dark poems shine great beauty and a strange, tentative-yet-tough kindness, while simile and lyricism transform each poem into a mythology that is both frightening and comforting. ? Nancy White, author of Sun, Moon, Salt and Detour Carr's narrator picks scabs off his philosophical wounds while his alter ego, "One Sleeve," attempts to make sense of a fractured universe. "Irony is the new certainty," declares Carr's ambivalent speaker, caught between the physical sensations and philosophical problems of this world and the next. ? David Hulm, Kirkwood Community College, Iowa City The very first poem announces that Carr will not be playing by the rules. "He thinks of himself in the third person / except sometimes when he talks. // I talk between people. / I aim for the space between passersby." Breaking the rules allows the narrator to speak with/as a protean voice that makes him always multiple, inciting us-we passersby-into remaining, like One Sleeve, "awake, counting beams of snowlight / hovering in the slats of the blinds." ? H. L. Hix, author of First Fire, Then Birds