Richard Carr's writing has appeared in Poetry East, Exquisite Corpse, New Letters, Painted Bride Quarterly and elsewhere. His poetry collections are Grave Reading, Lucifer, Dead Wendy, Imperfect Prayers, One Sleeve, Ace, Street Portraits, Honey, and Mister Martini. A former systems analyst, web designer, and tavern manager, he grew up in Blue Earth, Minnesota, and currently teaches in Minneapolis.
"The poems in Richard Carr's powerfully engaging Our Blue Earth
rise from the often troubled and troubling shadows of a childhood
and youth spent on a family farm. Here is a landscape of conflicted
reminiscence, of toil and mud, where storms meddle in human affairs
and 'night hauls its groggy paunch across the plains.' Here too are
portraits of a distant mother parceling out morsels of maternal
care and a father in whose voice his son can hear 'the god of winds
and storm'--a god who nonetheless will 'let the barn fall down /
and disappear.' But Carr's project in Our Blue Earth is ultimately
that of retrieval, both of the light and the dark, at which he
succeeds admirably in these poems of lyric grace and subtle
rhyme."
--Richard Foerster
"Years ago, moving from California to Wisconsin, I saw a highway
sign for Blue Earth, and in that instant knew that town's evocative
name was the title of my next book. Life in the town itself was a
mystery. Now I read Richard Carr's mysterious and musical poetry
that records the voices of residents of Our Blue Earth, where he
grew up. He invites us to dwell on the farm, to hunt the deep
woods, to be in bed in the house great-grandfather built and be a
dreaming boy who is 'the storm approaching.' The man, whose mother
'didn't want to raise a country boy' and drives him 100 miles each
way to see the Messiah, will not stay on the farm to harvest with
his hands, but Carr's harvest is his poetry, Our Blue Earth's
family memory, grit and hard work, ghosts, dream, deer who speak
from snow and corn stubble, a cornucopia for our souls."
--Aliki Barnstone
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