Overview

In lyrical, kaleidoscopic prose, Majestic Cut examines the divergent narratives families tell about the stories that define them. Masterfully weaving narrative and art theory, metaphysics, and memory, this book is part-memoir, part-meditation on meaning-making and the slippery nature of time. At once a philosophical inquiry and an unflinching portrait of a family confronting trauma and its aftermath, Majestic Cut is an inventive and searing reckoning with the limits of monolithic truth in the stories we tell ourselves-and each other.

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9781594982286

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Reviews

In lyrical, kaleidoscopic prose, poet Emily Carlson excavates and examines the divergent narratives families tell about the stories that define them. Masterfully weaving narrative and art theory, metaphysics, and memory, Majestic Cut is part-memoir, part-meditation on meaning-making and the slippery nature of time. At once a philosophical inquiry and an unflinching portrait of a family confronting trauma and its aftermath, this book is an inventive and searing reckoning with the limits of monolithic truth in the stories we tell ourselves-and each other. Thomas Page McBee What are we to do when what we are most certain about dwells next to our greatest doubts? What kinds of stories can we tell when we let go of monsters and heroes? What happens to our impermissible emotions once we have ""put them out, like a dog in the rain?"" In Majestic Cut, our primary guide is the speaker of these poems, a rigorous and brave thinker. Emily Carlson also offers us another companion through these questions-the artist Gordon Matta-Clarke, who made his own majestic cuts through abandoned buildings. Matta-Clarke's art helps these poems make a new space where something beyond freezing or fleeing is possible. Sarah Marxer In this lyrical near-memoir, Emily Carlson lifts snatches of her story through turbid water toward the light, as her mother's voice hangs over her shoulder, editing each moment into doubt. In Carlson's hands, the chronicle of a mother's abusive relationship and a daughter's urgent desire to rescue her fracture into celestial debris, a constellation of questions both mundane and metaphysical. In searching, delicate prose, Carlson cuts her house in half and holds it to her keen mind's eye, examining all its torn and worn parts, its misalignments, its contradictions-with tenderness, unyielding grace, and an unblinking gaze. Camille Rankine

Author Information

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Emily Carlson earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. Emily is the author of Why Misread a Cloud, winner of a Sunken Garden Chapbook Award; I Have a Teacher, winner of a Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition; and Symphony No 2. Their writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Dodge, Fence, jubilat, Poet Lore, Speculative Nonfiction, swamp pink, Vox Populi, and elsewhere. Emily teaches poetry in a public school in Pittsburgh, is the director of Art in the Garden, and with friends, runs the Bonfire Reading Series. Emily lives with her partner and their three children in a cohousing community built around a garden.

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