Carrie Etter Bücher

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.“The spare, lucid sentences of these prose poems make a brilliant and urgent response to the Czech artist Toyen’s surreal line drawings with their images of war and childhood. The second of these two linked series features U.S. school and university shootings, and of central resonance is a shooting incident which took place in 2012 in a school in Normal, lllinois where Carrie Etter grew up. This is work of powerful restraint, but fertile also, proving that ‘there is no such thing as a blank canvas’.” Moniza Alvi

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.?