Luscious Struggle by Carrie Conners is a terrific book of great vision. With inspiring imagination, Conners takes us into the private worlds of "real" people with "real" stories, and does so with deep compassion. Through skillfully rendered details, we see and hear the voices of steelworkers, prisoners, the ambulance driver, the pharmacist—and the tough voices of working-class West Virginia. This book breathes a love for humanity, and transmits the truth with a brave heart:…She still doesn't know what//was different about the day her body took control. Buy this book!
—Jan Beatty, author of Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
How rare to find a first book contain poetry of such delightful impetuousness and flawless storytelling. The poems are at turns funny and sad, profound and playful. I was not surprised to find one poem written "after" Russell Edson and his hand is felt in several of these pieces but by no means all. There are other poems whose strength relies less on the delightfully weird and more on a close observation of the everyday as seen through the dual lens of heartache and blue-collar struggle. I must admire, as well, her understated humor in a poem like Sex Ed and the strikingly macabre whimsy of a poem like Ambulance Driver. It is an astonishing first collection holding both power and promise.
—Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia and author of Woman in Red Anorak, 2017 Blue Lynx Prize
Carrie Conners, originally from West Virginia, lives in Queens, NY and teaches at LaGuardia Community College-CUNY. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Kestrel, Cider Press Review, Quiddity, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.
ISBN 978-1-93814461-5
$17.00 BrickHouse Books
Luscious Struggle by Carrie Conners is a terrific book of great vision. With inspiring imagination, Conners takes us into the private worlds of "real" people with "real" stories, and does so with deep compassion. Through skillfully rendered details, we see and hear the voices of steelworkers, prisoners, the ambulance driver, the pharmacist—and the tough voices of working-class West Virginia. This book breathes a love for humanity, and transmits the truth with a brave heart:…She still doesn't know what//was different about the day her body took control. Buy this book!
—Jan Beatty, author of Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
How rare to find a first book contain poetry of such delightful impetuousness and flawless storytelling. The poems are at turns funny and sad, profound and playful. I was not surprised to find one poem written "after" Russell Edson and his hand is felt in several of these pieces but by no means all. There are other poems whose strength relies less on the delightfully weird and more on a close observation of the everyday as seen through the dual lens of heartache and blue-collar struggle. I must admire, as well, her understated humor in a poem like Sex Ed and the strikingly macabre whimsy of a poem like Ambulance Driver. It is an astonishing first collection holding both power and promise.
—Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia and author of Woman in Red Anorak, 2017 Blue Lynx Prize
Carrie Conners, originally from West Virginia, lives in Queens, NY and teaches at LaGuardia Community College-CUNY. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Kestrel, Cider Press Review, Quiddity, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.
ISBN 978-1-93814461-5
$17.00 BrickHouse Books
