Carrie Etter – författare

'In Imagined Sons Carrie Etter reflects on the experience of a birthmother who gave up her son when she was seventeen. In a series of haunting, psalm-like prose poems of enormous courage and insight, she describes possible encounters with this son now in his late teens, expressing how 'sometimes the melancholy arrives before the remembering'. The series of 'Birthmother's Catechisms' return to repeated, harrowing questions that yield different answers at different moments. This quite extraordinary book by a writer of great imagistic power and skill leaves a mark on the reader which is ineradicable. These are poems of the utmost importance.'Bernard O'DonoghueBorn in Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter has lived in California and the UK and is a poet, essayist, critic and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She is the author of a number of poetry books and pamphlets including The Tethers (Seren, ISBN: 9781854114921) which won a London Festival Fringe First Book Prize and she has edited the anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman), Her poetry and criticism have appeared widely in the USA and the UK including Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian.

In her collection The Weather in Normal, Carrie Etter laments the loss of her hometown of Normal, Illinois through the death of her parents, the sale of the family home, and the effects of climate change on Illinois’ landscape and lives. The author’s restlessly inventive use of multiple tones, shifting line lengths, and fresh turns of phrase are as much a means of conveying complex and paradoxical emotions as they are a determined formal strategy to avoid cliché. Shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for her last collection, Imagined Sons, Etter has built a following based on her highly original and deeply emotive poetry.

Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter is a shattering elegy for the poet’s mother, opening a pathway through grief in spite of the impossible task of expressing such a loss. Beginning both chronologically and alphabetically, the collection moves from early life with the narrator’s adoption, through to the mother’s unexpected death and the banal yet painful tasks which follow, such as sorting clothes and arranging the funeral. The final section deals with life after loss, and the long work of grieving which culminates in the title poem. Evoking the complex, intimate relationship between mother and daughter, this raw yet deft collection celebrates love in the same breath as it weeps for its loss.

This is an anthology of radical new women's poetry from the UK, featuring work by: Sascha Akhtar, Isobel Armstrong, Caroline Bergvall, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Anne Blonstein, Andrea Brady, Emily Critchley, Claire Crowther, Carrie Etter, Catherine Hales, Frances Kruk, Rachel Lehrman, Sophie Mayer, Marianne Morris, Wendy Mulford, Redell Olsen, Frances Presley, Anna Reckin, Carlyle Reedy, Sophie Robinson, Lucy Sheerman, Zoe Skoulding, Harriet Tarlo, and Carol Watts.

In 1999, living in southern California, Carrie Etter began a series of poems focusing on our cultural obsession with creating beginnings and origins-a new day, a new chapter, a fresh start-called 'Divining for Starters'. Twelve years and a move to England later, here are the best poems from that work in progress. They join poems exploring the environment, the erotic, politics, and selfhood. Employing a poetics of consciousness in an array of forms, Divining for Starters ranges widely with poems at once rigorous and delicate.

In Scar, Carrie Etter compellingly explores the effects of climate change on her home state of Illinois. The language shifts and evolves painfully as the land and its inhabitants find themselves wracked by climatic and political forces beyond their control.

"The thike, Claire Crowther's imaginary creation, 'broods, plays, and is "othered" by an uncaring society'. The poetry that appeals to Crowther, and for which she acts as such an eloquent advocate, often does the same. The essays of Sense and Nonsense are passionate acts of elective affinity, precise and careful homages to kindred spirits from Lorine Niedecker and Veronica Forrest-Thomson to Denise Riley and R. F. Langley. Carrie Etter's forensic interviews send us back to Crowther's own poetry, and remind us that she is entirely at ease in such company. Generous and gladsome, a gift of a book." -David Wheatley

The title Veer, Oscillate, Rest conveys the energy of these poems as much as the range of their interests, from Trump's first presidency, to environmental disaster, to Brexit, to the 'teeming', lived conjunction of embodiment and consciousness, is chapbook brings together some of Carrie Etter's best uncollected poems from 2008 to 2023 in a selection that foregrounds her rigour, intelligence, and irrepressible verve.

Winner of the London Festival Fringe Prize for Best First Collection 2010American expatriate Carrie Etter's debut collection, The Tethers, introduces a compelling new voice. By turns wry, celebratory, and pensive, the poems roam from an imaginary village to Manhattan, the southwestern U.S., London, the Czech Republic, and Etter's homeland, the Illinois prairie.With a lyric intensity born of compression and linguistic precision, the travels in The Tethers are as much psychological as physical, exploring the life of the mind as it engages with delight and despair, pleasure and hardship, in an unusually mature first book."Many contemporary poets blow away in the gale of nihil and nonsense that life is becoming, but some still try to weather it – Carrie Etter is one of the few to have found strong roots to cling to, and one of the very few in whose lines one can discern the flesh-and-blood figure of a witness wholly alive, alert to the evidence, unsparing but unjudging, getting it down by heart. Sorrowing, glad, graceful, The Tethers is a rich and significant debut." Glyn Maxwell"The Tethers is full of highly intelligent, often finely cadenced and in the best sense measured poetry. Carrie Etter deftly fuses accents of modern America and England with a strong sense of the Classics. Nuanced, lyrical, occasionally humorous, these poems reveal time after time an acute sense of 'the rise and fall of what we cannot moor'." Robert Crawford"Terse, wry, discreetly metaphysical, Carrie Etter's poems have the economy of good jokes. A first book to be remarked."Rosanna WarrenOriginally from Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter lives in Bradford on Avon and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.

Celebrating an increasingly interesting form that concentrates short prose pieces with the techniques of poetry brought to bear, this is the first anthology of its kind in the UK and features well known proponents of the prose poetry form such as George Szirtes and Pascale Petit, as well as emerging voices. -- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru

In The Shooting Gallery, Carrie Etter juxtaposes two series of prose poems: one exploring Czech surrealist Toyen's World War II line drawings and one addressing US school and university shootings since Columbine High School in 1999. Both series consider the awful conjunction of youth and violence, at once real and surreal. In these terse, chilling, and compelling poems, Etter explores the aftermath, a landscape of loss and unanswerable questions.