Lisa Olstein & Julie Carr | Book Launch

A book launch celebration for Lisa Olstein’s Late Empire and Julie Carr’s Objects from a Borrowed Confession.

Lisa Olstein is the author of three previous poetry collections: RADIO CRACKLING, RADIO GONE, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, LOST ALPHABET, and LITTLE STRANGER, named a top book of the year by Coldfront. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Writing Residency, and an Essay Press chapbook prize, as well as fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Centrum. She is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas, Austin.

Pre-publication Reviews for LATE EMPIRE:
This timely yet elemental collection from Olstein (Little Stranger) unfolds where the exigencies and distractions of daily life brush up against the political, the ethical, and the existential. The whistle, an ambivalent sound, repeatedly intercedes as a refrain in the prose poems of the collection’s core, where such phenomena as school concerts, global warming, conversations among friends, animals in captivity, kidnappings, car radios, Kurt Cobain, and Godzilla make their presence known…Olstein’s profound and attentive poems reveal her formal dexterity and knack for spotting modernity’s absurdities: “Some days even business as usual seems rare.” (Oct.) —Publishers Weekly

Olstein’s long sentences come into being in the most mesmerizing ways; like watching some new molecular architecture being teased from the well of centrifuge; sometimes, foundation to cupola but as often cupola to foundation, and equally inhabitable. —Michael Snediker

Previous Praise:
This poet brings a sparkling consciousness to the page and an exciting new voice to American poetry. —Library Journal, Best of 2009 selection

Is she just smarter about syntax, more articulate about human drama, more imaginative about eeriness, more insightful about sadness, more capable of turning a novel phrase, more engaging a storyteller than nearly all the rest of her peers? Well, yes. —Huffington Post

Tenderness, then, is a form of resistance. It allows Olstein to create intimacy on the page not only among those who inhabit these poems, but also in those of us reading them. It is the way these poems, for all their machinery, remind us that we are human, While at times the poems feel hunkered-down, peering at us through the slates of their lines, this collection capably and artfully tests the tension between privacy and secrecy. With this book, Olstein has declared herself a poet worth watching. —The Rumpus

Julie Carr is the author of seven books of poetry and two works of prose, with forthcoming works in both genres. Her most recent collection OBJECTS FROM A BORROWED CONFESSION debuted in 2017 from Ahsahta Press. Born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Julie Carr lives in Denver with Tim Roberts and their three children. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the English department and the Intermedia Arts Writing and Performance Ph.D. where she teaches courses in poetry and poetics from the eighteenth century to the present

Pre-publication Reviews for OBJECTS FROM A BORROWED CONFESSION:
OBJECTS FROM A BORROWED CONFESSION vibrates with an alyrical 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 laud 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

But in the process of following this human thesis, Carr has not created a poetry book in the confessional genre, but has given over the contents of a life, as poets and writers do, to the act and idea of confession, with its tandem regret and forgiveness, envy and apology, its Janus head of reflection and visioning. This acupunctural book emerges what we already know in our tissue and chronic pains. —Library Journal

Previous Praise:
As Carr shuttles among her triple roles as mother, daughter, writers, individual words and phonemes shuttle back and forth like classical melodies —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

The stalwart energy, risky invention, and luminous intelligence of this book make the air clearer, the world lighter, and give company to those who grieve. —Jean Valentine

Carr illuminates the marriage of the inner and outer worlds, often taking detours from sense and always taking them to interesting places, always landing somewhere deeply felt. —Cole Swensen