Obsidian

Acclaim

In this magical, engaging rapture, women lovers become volcanos…and “all the maps change.” Tina Carlson explores the dark, where fire and desire flare, illuminating planets and stars, the colors of “bosque and blood.” Beautifully imaginative, this poet is unafraid to take on risk by repeating her own deeply imaginative myth. The vocabulary of geology in relationship is always in constant flux, creating smolder, ash, flame, glaciers. Obsidian. This writer discovers the deepest layers, carrying “smoke in her hair.”

Mary Morris

This collection is a volcanic shapeshifter—sometimes sleeping, sometimes dreaming—but its internal rhymes and rhythm always remain molten at the core. Obsidian chronicles the heat and pressure of memory cooled into the ground our lives are built on. With echoes of Adrienne Rich and Marilyn Hacker, Carlson brings a powerful queer poetics of witness and awakening.

Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium

“In A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, vulnerable myths and porous pasts are ‘blown open.’ These poems unhinge for the reader a kind of nourishment. ‘We were once specks of light,’ Carlson writes, as she moves us toward illumination.”

Claudia Mauro

…This is a book of embodied poems, somatic poems that resonate in your bones, your gut. The poems summon up desire, the kind of desire that takes possession of the body and moves it electric and live-wire. Molten, a burning slick/feverish. Girls geared up and lit.

Heathen Derr-Smith

Where to Buy

Published by: Dancing Girl Press & Studio

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Tina Carlson

Tina Carlson is a queer poet living in New Mexico. She is the author of two previously published collections of poetry: Ground, Wind, This Body (UNM Press, 2017) and, We Are Meant to Carry Water (3: A Taos Press), a collaboration with 2 other NM poets. A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery is forthcoming in spring 2023 from UNM Press.