Sometimes the Blue Trees

Author: Carly Inghram 

Publisher: Vegetarian Alcoholic Press (2019)

Inghram’s work is interested in issues of Black womanhood and image formation amongst and against societal expectations. This book of poems employ masterful wordplay in examination of suicide, identity, grief, purpose, and family. 

"Carly Inghram's Sometimes the Blue Trees unflinchingly describes the violence people commit against each other and against themselves. This violence may be literal or symbolic, and race is frequently its motivator: "The role of a poet is to represent some truth. / When I forget the truth, I might refer to any number / of dangling bodies I've encountered to my left or right." Self-aware, conflicted, funny, and always imaginative, Sometimes the Blue Trees speaks Inghram's unique experience as well as a larger, shared history that can't continue to shed so much blood. These poems are part of a healing."

–Alan Gilbert

“Original and vibrant, Carly Inghram’s poems are like ‘the scissors / you use to tell a story / about who you are,’ cutting through our contemporary landscape and then reconstructing it in a way all her own. These poems are so imaginative, and so unsparing in their confrontations, that it can knock you out.”

–Robert C.L. Crawford