Underscore

＂Julie Carr’s most intimate book to date, The Underscore, is dedicated to two of Carr’s foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac and tender-at times erotic at other times bitter-these poems explore the passions of friendship and love for the living and the dead. Reaching at once toward the ＂ghost companions in the thicket＂ and to the beloveds who still ＂pulse with activity,＂ The Underscore’s sonically intricate poems ultimately yearn toward a public intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, what Stark Smith called ＂overlapping kinespherees.＂ There, in the ＂green, green underscore,＂ ＂the darkened / cloth / changes / hands.＂＂--

Julie Carr is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, including Climate, cowritten with Lisa Olstein; Real Life: An Installation; Objects from a Borrowed Confession; Someone Shot My Book; and 100 Notes on Violence. She lives in Denver where she teaches at the University of Colorado and helps run Counterpath, a press bookstore, gallery, and community garden space.