"What distinguishes Patricia Carlin’s poetry is a rare combination of freshness and literary depth.” –Molly Peacock
Patricia Carlin: Quantum Jitters

Praise for Quantum Jitters

Patricia Carlin combines an adventurous sense of form with an unmistakably personal voice of sharp wit and subtle intelligence. She draws on everything from fairy tales, to the techniques of Oulipo, to transformations of the work of others such as Virginia Woolf . The poems can be playful; but there is also a disquieting beauty to these lyrics. -- Elaine Equi

Patricia Carlin’s poems are a pulse-taking scan of experimental forms metabolically torqued to breaking point. Quantum Jitters comes with needful phrases, “negations,” mini-arguments that expand on contact, where the smallest wisp of a word turns out to be a good straw to grasp. Readers will find here a homeopathic remedy for our disaster-prone quantum universe. -- Elizabeth Macklin

Praise for Original Green

“Original Green is a pure and original pleasure. Patricia Carlin is quick in catching sight of the rich, populous, difficult world we live in. She shows it as the locus, close up, of all we dream or dread. Her language takes hold of us, as authentic for inner as for outer landscapes. Because the images are beautiful in their discernment, I at once trust the rightness of her music, her perceptions, and her discoveries.”—Marie Ponsot

“ Her poetry is driven, yet knowing, savvy, yet communicable; and her voice is among those changing the face of poetry as we will come to know it in the 21st century.”—Molly Peacock

“ Patricia Carlin’s poems are marked by clarity of expression, great wit, uncompromising intelligence, multiple perspectives, and the embrace of a spectrum of voices and registers. Her work is original, provocative, and metaphysically compelling. She has the courage to pursue an insight or emotion through a labyrinth of images, allusions, and ideas. The poems are experimental in the truest sense of the word. Joy and skepticism suffuse her work like a balance of darkness and light. Doors keep opening, even in the most unlikely spaces, and the rooms they lead to alter our entire conception of the place we thought we had entered.”–Phillis Levin

ISBN 978-0-9785555-6-6 $15.00

 

THE BOX TURTLE

can live for up to a hundred years.
Unless the water dries up or the land is cleared
he will spend that hundred years
in the same square-mile patch of woodland.
The voice of the turtle is never heard.
There's no sound to cloud his slow lurching waddle
inch by rickety inch over the yellowing leaves
as he searches for water.
Plated, boxed: splayed legs; sharp tail;
head red-eyed and beaked on a thick short neck.
It's hard not to think of him as inside his shell
although in fact he is his shell as much as he's not.
He can never see his own design.
Intricate tessellated bone-house spotted with profligate red,
and the soft self, thrusting out and withdrawing.
And there's no metaphor in this. No poetry.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE PARTHENON

So many girls
to choose from, so many destinies: waves
breaking
on a distant shore. Nothing
remains. Do we come again wearing white -
virgin white, shroud white -
girls who have done nothing,
for whom nothing waits? A girl
can be broken
on her father's altar, to make the waves
roll on to Troy. A girl can be a wave,
a white
wave breaking
on a distant shore. A girl
can be nothing.
Nothing returns as itself.
Wavering
girls
leave their white
bodies.
They are broken into mothers,
mothers are broken into nothing,
into wave after wave
of white
girls
rising like moonlight.
This girl
is destined to break hearts.
Her white hands do nothing
good. That girl makes love
to her own words.
They will lie down, wavering
between shadows.
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