POETRY BY NANCY NAOMI CARLSON
Piano in the Dark
Seagull Books, May 2023
A ‘must-read Editor’s Choice’ by Poetry Daily
This latest book of wonders from Nancy Naomi Carlson fixes upon one of the few defenses we have to confront the body’s betrayals—our words. Though in the end, even the world’s last word “forgets its name...has no word for this forgetting.” At once vulnerable and open, tempered and tempted equally by the erotic and the empathic, such dualities limn these affectingly beautiful and lyrical poems. Carlson’s lines, entreating as Scheherazade, “weave chords / into tales within tales, whirlpools within seas” to save her life. Indeed, music has no need for voice or harp, as “in anechoic chambers, you become / the only instrument of your worldly sounds,” echoing Mozart’s credo “that music lies / in the silence between notes.”
In a world scarred by pandemics, wars, and violent tribalism, the givens are gone—“talismans we clung to, believing / we might be spared in some way / by marking our doors / with our own sacrificial blood.” In these unflinching free and formal verse poems, Carlson seduces us with the promise of the joy yet to be had, were we to look in the right places.
REVIEWS FOR PIANO IN THE DARK:
‘Carlson envisions poetry as a community to get through a literal and metaphorical sandstorm as she mourned the deaths of those around her and stood strong against yearly mammograms during the COVID years. And through her playing of the piano in the dark, like Chopin before her, “the earth ceased to mourn”.’—Tiffany Troy, Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University.
An Infusion of Violets
*SELECTED AS ONE OF "TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2019" BY BELTWAY POETRY QUARTERLY
Seagull Books, August 2019
Using the same musical sense of language she applies to her translations, Nancy Naomi Carlson masterfully interprets herself in Infusion of Violets. The sometimes erotic, sometimes melancholy landscapes she creates as the self-appointed sitar’s “ragged throat, pitched/ between here and when, / caught in quartertones,” take our breath away. Carlson describes an interior world where tears can produce “so much salt a body floats away,” where “music tuned to loss descends with rain,” and where hope is placed in the “kill-cure.” Here we encounter Carlson’s ex-husbands and luminaries such as Rachmaninoff and Monet, among others. Filled with striking images and sensuous language, Infusion of Violets is an evocative mix of formal and free verse poems.
Reviews for An Infusion of Violets
"Carlson, who also works as a translator and editor, uses controlled lines and a lyrical voice to plumb the self, often with biblical overtones."
—New and Noteworthy/Poetry, The New York Times Book Review, 6/23/2019
"Solitude and quiet strength run throughout the elegant, understated writing in 'An Infusion of Violets' (Seagull Books) by poet and translator Nancy Naomi Carlson. Early on, the speaker recalls her broken marriages and unfulfilled desire for love. Other challenges follow as she battles cancer and watches her father slide into dementia. Despite her own difficulties, she honors those struggles and others, including the anguish of teenagers whose stories are overlooked by most of the people around them. Like Persephone, Carlson moves through various seasons, creating some stunning moments. She also welcomes the heat of transformation, as in the poem “Glass, Glorious Glass!”: “Fill me with your fire and make me conform/ to your breath, writhing in the heat but not/ consumed. Make me blossom birds of paradise/ or weave me wings of indigo or white.”
—Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post, 10/15/2019
"The multifaceted Nancy Naomi Carlson delivers poetic riches in her third collection, spooling out lines that engage all the senses while weaving threads of spirituality, eroticism, and art into one rich tapestry. With poems that traverse that spectrum from formal to free, An Infusion of Violets offers readers an opportunity to join Carlson in the great conversation of poetry that effortlessly spans cultures, languages, and time."
--Autumn 2019 Book Reviews, Word Literature Today
"The title foretells the lushness of lines. As a translator, Carlson knows the value of the rarefied word — she makes decisions from other languages in terms of cadence and sound. [...] These poems, years in the writing, radiate inward. She’s right to call it an infusion."
--Grace Cavalieri, Midwest Book Review
Complications of the Heart
*WINNER OF THE 2002 ROBERT PHILIPS POETRY CHAPBOOK PRIZE
Texas Review Press, June 2003
REVIEWS FOR COMPLICATIONS OF THE HEART:
"Is Nancy Naomi Carlson a prophetess or goddess? One ponders this question while reading Complications of the Heart. What will encourage the reader to genuflect is the range of her work as well as the mixture of passion and intellect. Carlson’s poems at times can be caught wearing lace. Maybe this is the formalism clinging to the hem of her muse. There is balance in this collection because Carlson once wore cigar bands and pop-top rings.”
—E. Ethelbert Miller
“Offering up sensuous language which is sometimes memorably formal and always musical, Nancy Naomi Carlson manages an eerie, provocative blend of poems about the different bodies of love a woman may inhabit. When she writes in ‘Sari-Covered Nights’ that ‘My five mouths roll their uvulas, / guttural as high winds crossing desert dunes,’ she speaks not only of the multiple lives we must recognize in ourselves, but also of the poet’s need and obligation to render many possibilities at once.”
—Stephen Corey
*WINNER OF THE 2002 ROBERT PHILIPS POETRY CHAPBOOK PRIZE
Texas Review Press, June 2003
REVIEWS FOR COMPLICATIONS OF THE HEART:
"Is Nancy Naomi Carlson a prophetess or goddess? One ponders this question while reading Complications of the Heart. What will encourage the reader to genuflect is the range of her work as well as the mixture of passion and intellect. Carlson’s poems at times can be caught wearing lace. Maybe this is the formalism clinging to the hem of her muse. There is balance in this collection because Carlson once wore cigar bands and pop-top rings.”
—E. Ethelbert Miller
“Offering up sensuous language which is sometimes memorably formal and always musical, Nancy Naomi Carlson manages an eerie, provocative blend of poems about the different bodies of love a woman may inhabit. When she writes in ‘Sari-Covered Nights’ that ‘My five mouths roll their uvulas, / guttural as high winds crossing desert dunes,’ she speaks not only of the multiple lives we must recognize in ourselves, but also of the poet’s need and obligation to render many possibilities at once.”
—Stephen Corey
Kings Highway
*CO-WINNER, WASHINGTON WRITERS PUBLISHING HOUSE
Washington Writers Publishing House, April 1997
REVIEWS FOR KINGS HIGHWAY:
"In this taut gathering of lyrics, lyrical narratives, and dramatic monologues, Nancy Carlson reminds us that the poet’s true arena is not human experiences-which all of us undergo-but the articulation of those experiences via language. A mother grieves for her dead newborn and celebrates her living children, composer Robert Schumann offers a passionate lament from his asylum cell, a beekeeping wife and husband discover in their shared work a strange, luminous image of their love:
“Veiled and gloved, / we hold our ground, / handfuls of bees! balanced between us.”
Articulation: “the way in which parts are joined together; utterance or enunciation, a way of talking or pronouncing…”
—Stephen Corey
"Kings Highway is freighted with loss, though loss is the poet’s route to understanding and acceptance. Poems here reiterate and expand on this theme. At their center, literally and metaphorically, is breath, as in the acute attentiveness to a newborn’s giving breath up, to a drowned baby’s breath “resurfacing,” to a starling “still formed, it looked asleep,” to a violin’s breath rising from the “rosined bow! against each string.” These are poems attuned to the subtle motions of grief and love that give need to words in the first place."
—Merrill Leffler
