13 Ways of Happily

WINNER OF THE NEW MEASURE POETRY PRIZE "If ostranenie-to make strange-is the mandate of contemporary poetry, EMILY CARR has achieved this both brilliantly and beautifully. Kaleidoscopic in its glimmering slivers, the life she brings us is built of charged familiars slightly and completely changed: the sun turns on its stem; the stallion rolls in a pasture of blue ether. Although she references poetic antecedents from Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams to Joan Retallack and Mary Ruefle, it's not their voices, but their facility for invention, itself here reinvented, that keeps waking us up into a world sometimes alarming, often unsettling, and always careening until we, too, arrive 'delirious & shredded, sailing sideways through the greenly ravished vowels.'"-COLE SWENSEN "The poems of Emily Carr's 13 WAYS OF HAPPILY are like the butterflies of which she writes, "all-mond & a-mind white an ecstasy of crystalline palimpsest" sprouting "wings in the mind." They waver across imagination's field, alight on detail or insight, "flimmer on the dream's / cobweb." God and angels in wry company with the "plush octopus," the particular songbird, the Pepsi ad. Carr is alert to the environmental "surround," her poems delicate fronds of the observable world as it touches upon the window of inner plane. One reads a Carr poem first in wonder, for each poem is a tensile condensation that startles then dazzles. One returns, though, to ponder the profound stillness at the heart of 13 WAYS OF HAPPILY." -CYNTHIA HOGUE "What I find most appealing is that this book seems a living sensibility, as if I can feel its vibrancy in my hands. It has the intellectual curiosity and linguistic verve that power so much current poetry, but without any cynical disdain for traditional lyricism and figurative language. In fact, its fractured, episodic nature seems to push metaphor toward fresh ways of honoring both the microcosmic and the metaphysical, toward places where "phytoplankton in a raindrop echo" and "love . . . is a sail at the end of the world." The overall effect is expansive and exotic-a "mirage of buoyant polyglot" that remains grounded in immediate sensory and emotive experience, yet channels and extends that experience throughout even the most self-conscious formal innovation. There is a brilliant mind at work here, and an open heart-and the result is strangely beautiful."-MARK COX EMILY CARR'S first book, DIRECTIONS FOR FLYING (Furniture Press), was the winner of the 2009 FURNITURE PRESS POETRY PRIZE. Her chapbook, THE STORY WILL FIX YOU IT IS THERE OUTSIDE YOUR &, was published in Toadlily Press's 2009 Quartet Series. In 2010, Emily was a Poetry Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center & Writer in Residence at the Jack Kerouac House. You can read her work in recent issues of PRAIRIE SCHOONER, THE SPOON RIVER POETRY REVIEW, HAYDEN'S FERRY REVIEW, THE JOURNAL, BOMBAY GIN, MARGIE, INTERIM, CAKETRAIN, PHOEBE, FOURTEEN HILLS, THE CAPILANO REVIEW, SO TO SPEAK, DUSIE, and VERSAL.