Tender lyric poetry dedicated to two of the poet’s most influential late teachers.
 
Julie Carr’s deeply intimate collection, 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, tender, and at times erotic or bitter, these poems explore the passions of friendship and love for the living as well as the dead. Carr’s lyric poetry expresses the intricate many-layered relationships between individuals who are constantly shifting in their roles with one another. She considers otherness and nature while remaining deeply invested in human relationships and exploring the conflict of maintaining one’s own interiority amid a life whose backdrop is human suffering.
 
Reaching toward the “ghost companions in the thicket” and to the beloveds who still “pulse with activity,” Underscore’s sonically intricate poems express a longing for dynamic forces of intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, and what Stark Smith called “overlapping kinespheres.”
 

Julie Carr is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, including Climate, cowritten with Lisa Olstein; Real Life: An Installation; Objects from a Borrowed Confession; Someone Shot My Book; and 100 Notes on Violence. She lives in Denver where she teaches at the University of Colorado and helps run Counterpath, a press bookstore, gallery, and community garden space.