Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble

Inside this debut collection, girlhood's dangers echo, transmuted, in the poet's fears for her son. A body just discovering the vastness of "want's new acreage" is humbled by chronic illness. Epithalamion turns elegy. But this world that so often seems capricious in its cruelty also shelters apple orchards, glass museums, schoolchildren, century-old sharks; "there's no accounting for / all we want to save, no names."

Oliver's polyphonic gathering of speakers includes lovers and saints, painters and dead poets, a hawk and a mother. In varied forms (ghazals and prose poems, dialogues and erasures, bref double and Golden Shovel, among others) these poems bear witness to and seek reprieve from disasters at once commonplace and terrifying. "I can't surface for every scalpel slice, / I need a dreamy estuary present," she writes.

Stumbling toward joy across time and space, these poems hum with fear and desire, bewildering loss, and love's lush possibilities.


Author: Carolyn Oliver
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Published: 07/13/2022
Pages: 90
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.90w x 0.40d
ISBN13: 9781647690915
ISBN10: 1647690919
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | General

About the Author
Carolyn Oliver's poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Radar Poetry, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Cherry Tree, Plume, DIALOGIST, The National Poetry Review, and in many other journals. Carolyn is the winner of the E. E. Cummings Prize from the NEPC, the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, the Writer's Block Prize in Poetry, and the Frank O'Hara Prize from The Worcester Review. She lives in Massachusetts with her family.