Interviews with the Author
PoetrySnaps! Tina Carlson: ‘In the Palm of My Hand, Rivers’ — Interview with Steven Law
New Mexico poet Tina Carlson’s latest book, Obsidian, focuses on metamorphosis. She says poetry can take the otherworldly, the unsayable or the horrific and alchemize them into language that can move and sometimes heal. She reads “In the Palm of My Hand, Rivers.”
Acclaim
…Like the best poets among us, Carlson excels at the difficult task of putting into words the strange, mystical joy of being human. It is for that, that she is one of my favorite poets. Obsidian is at times erotic, at times transformative. Sometimes weighty, sometimes soaring. Always elegant. So beautifully written. I love this book!
Steven Law
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
