Laura Carter

The joy at the heart of us

Elizabeth Willis's 'Alive: New and Selected Poems'

Laura Carter

First of all, what would it mean to be fully alive? One thinks of the archetypal unicorn, the ever-present poet that can’t quite get enough of something, but what? In Lacanian terms, we might think joy, jouissance. In terms of Romantic literature, we might think love, or romance, or the spark of God that is, indeed, the last romantic that our world could know, now that we are moderns.

First of all, what would it mean to be fully alive? One thinks of the archetypal unicorn, the ever-present poet that can’t quite get enough of something, but what? In Lacanian terms, we might think joy, jouissance. In terms of Romantic literature, we might think love, or romance, or the spark of God that is, indeed, the last romantic that our world could know, now that we are moderns.

Motley attire

A review of Anne Boyer's 'Garments Against Women'

Laura Carter

If someone asked me how I would envision a garment against women, it would not be too difficult for me to respond. I would suggest something steel and hidebound, an I-beam with little to offer the imagination. It might be a dark cesspool of factory life, much as Marx would have written about in the nineteenth century. It might be a hairshirt or a black mirror that promises no future. In one sense, Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women captures this, but in another sense, it is a book that talks with a sense of hope about what the world could be.

Habitation caesurae

A review of Heather Christle's 'Heliopause'

Laura Carter

First of all, what is a heliopause? If etymology can be believed, it’s the caesura that lives in the sun, a respite from ordinary days and nights, a pause in life wearing a yellow dress, or maybe a green dress, maybe also embedded with jewels.

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