Emily Carr, 13 Ways of Happily

“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