Robert Carr
Author of three poetry collections: Amaranth, The Unbuttoned Eye and The Heavy of Human Clouds.
Author and poet, Robert Carr.
Praise for Robert Carr's Poetry
Slow, deliberate, and finely wrought, the poems in Amaranth remind the mouth that it has a tongue, remind the ear it that it has a heart. Robert Carr's expressive voice is spare, honest, precise, and inventive as his poems careen from the furnace of love to the brutality of death all while offering the reader a gorgeous lyrical accuracy that's both delicate and unforgiving.
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Ada Limón
I know of no book that captures so well as Robert Carr's magnificent The Unbuttoned Eye does how all the phases of the history of gay sexual liberation in America, in retrospect, now seem to occur simultaneously - flirtation, seduction, hilarity, ecstacy, the discovery of specific erotic preferences (individual and shared), thrilling debauchery, romance, camaraderie, infection, medicalization, caretaking, mourning, elegy, euphoric recall and inevitable forgetting. Carr's superb poems are tender intensities full of awe, creating a charged ritual stage upon which our handsomest ghosts are aroused, and arouse us, again.
Patrick Donnelly
Robert Carr's The Heavy of Human Clouds distills the near-death experience as all the best poetry does. Dealing with aging parents, the loss of one's mother, the aging body itself, and confronting one's own mortality - Carr's poems begin with these questions deliberately, lyrically, and with translucent lines that seem to to stretch like foxes into nature. Beauty is given generously in these poems: they are written in a language where everything is risky. His forms are intimate and make his surprising insights alter, heal, ignite, and transmute. It's terrific.
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Sean Singer