Underscore

"Julie Carr's most intimate book to date, The Underscore, is dedicated to two of Carr's foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac and tender-at times erotic at other times bitter-these poems explore the passions of friendship and love for the living and the dead. Reaching at once toward the "ghost companions in the thicket" and to the beloveds who still "pulse with activity," The Underscore's sonically intricate poems ultimately yearn toward a public intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, what Stark Smith called "overlapping kinespherees." There, in the "green, green underscore," "the darkened / cloth / changes / hands.""--