Three sequences of poems engaging with deserts, consumerism, Alaskan ice, religious icons, and more. 

The poems collected in The Book of Marys and Glaciers traverse both the psychological and physical landscape to explore the too-muchness and overwhelm that categorizes our demand-driven age. The longest series, “Dust Cover,” is a meditation on deserts of all kinds—geographic, urban, celestial, domestic, and linguistic. The poems themselves enact their own ideas of space and emptiness, building to a work that grain after grain becomes heavy as a whole. In contrast, the title sequence “The Book of Marys and Glaciers” is an expansive work of feminist ecopoetics that asks questions about the role of women as mothers, religious figures, friends, and lovers in a society that rarely makes room for quietude anymore. 

Altogether, the poems are controlled, precise investigations and interrogations of the ideas and images we take for granted.
 

Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago where she is the poetry editor for Black Ocean and the Promotions and Marketing Communications Director for the University of Chicago Press. Her books include Be the thing of memory, Operating Theater, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, and Intervening Absence, in addition to the chapbooks Proficiency Badges, Grapple, Overture in the Key of F, and A Useless Window. She is the curator of the Poetry & Biscuits house reading series and the newsletter of the same name, and when she’s not making poems, she’s probably making biscuits. 

Contents

I. Blockchain
II. The Book of Marys and Glaciers
III. Dust Cover