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ISBN: 978-1-59948-882-0, ~120 pages, $16 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: October 26, 2021
The Advance Sale Discount for this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $16.50/book (which includes shipping) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, PO BOX 690100, Charlotte, NC 28227-7001.
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Richard Carr has published eleven collections of poetry, three chapbooks, and numerous poems in journals. 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 has taught English as an adjunct for the last twenty years. Currently he lives with his cat in a three-room apartment in Minneapolis.
With wit and accessibility, Carr performs a magic trick: using crisp, sensual imagery and vividly-etched characters, he conjures a space where the literal and the metaphorical blur, blend, and invert before our eyes. It’s a feat performed with playfulness and intelligence—and ultimately, generosity. ~David Batcher, co-author of The Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America’s Most Public Family
Richard Carr’s book-length narrative poem Blind Green opens to reveal the interior of a poet. Writing “as the blind must: without guidance other than preternatural, reckless vision,” Blind Green introduces us to Sister, Green’s eyes and more; nurse Kat; Sister’s “boytoy, bozo” Beau; and don’t forget the tech college grad, “hero.” By the end of the poem the reader will have experienced the childhood joy that makes up the “paradox of consciousness” in Blind Green. ~Rich Murphy, author of The Left Behind
In Blind Green, Richard Carr gives us a seer like Tiresias, like Homer, like Milton. Each of these ninety-nine poems flies like a red balloon over a world in ruins. Each contains (or is contained by) thirteen lines, because these poems are for all the unlucky ones among us. The hero of these poems may be blind, but Carr sees through the eyes of the angels. This is the epic for the last generation. — Tom C. Hunley, author of What Feels Like Love: New and Selected Poems
I walk in the streets of the city
and on the dunes by the sea
and write as the blind must:
without guidance
other than preternatural, reckless vision.
I feel no obligation to be objective, open-minded, or just.
People say I cross lines
and that one day in some great moral gaff
I will trip and fall on my face.
But I see no lines—only a web of declarations
torn apart as I pass.
I skip through the morning air, a little above the earth,
and to fall is only to fly faster.
The hero is visionary
in his fantasies of wealth, sex, gun ownership,
but otherwise vacuous behind the sticky surface of his eyes.
He lives in a world of all pain all the time.
The lonely teenager studies his acne in the mirror.
Young women mimic dance moves well into their twenties.
Fathers and mothers grow old without explaining any mysteries.
I lord my power over him.
He checks the time on his cell phone and orders another beer.
A roofing contractor will call him in the evening.
Seven crews will shingle the roofs of a new subdivision.
These are the great accomplishments of men.
Our hero is sure of it.
Kat pulls me through the hotel lobby
like a child pulling a red wagon,
and once again I feel free.
The arriving elevator emits a tone,
a one-note song of exquisite melancholy.
In our room on the twenty-seventh floor
I imagine I’m looking out the window.
I can feel winter through the glass.
The city is sluggish in the night
and detestable for refusing to sleep.
Kat leads me to the bed.
While she puts the room in order, I dream of her
putting the room in order, turning out the light.