Think Tank

Author: Julie Carr

Publisher: Solid Objects (2015)

"'It's still dark / Then, a door,' begins Julie Carr's beautiful Think Tank. We are invited to step through it, into a space both interstitial and marked, always, with the parts that don't adhere: 'streaks of water between panes of glass,' 'shores . . . [like] garnets, as vital as they are coarse,' a '[p]inching and elliptical grammar . . . slightly tipped at the horizon.' This is where pleasure lies—in its tilted reality and luminous curiosity that resembles, so much, childhood imaginaries of loss, landscape and becoming. In connecting to these other qualities of consciousness, Carr opens apertures and seams of different kinds, in a complex, delicate, durational writing that could be both things: the mouth that releases its load of blood when it opens to speak, or something else—a way to get to the next part of life. 'At the doorway: endlessness,' Carr writes. And we follow her gaze until it breaks: 'glinting and wet.'"

–Bhanu Kapil