“Carr’s poetry is a feast of words unburdened by the grief and hope they carry, like a kite in a sky of drones. If ‘turning’ is a spiritual practice, Carr shapes it into a ritual of adjacency, recognition, and unfinished self-reckoning in a world seething with casual horror. Writing as ‘turning’ is the pitch-perfect act we all need to unsettle our stagnation and reclaim the gift of movement. Reading this book will move you to turn in uncharted ways.” 

Nabil Echchaibi, University of Colorado-Boulder

“We typically associate extreme acuity of perception with the predator’s eye, the falcon or the drone, but this second book in Carr’s exact and exacting Overflow trilogy proposes instead an extreme acuity of care. Absolutely unblinking as it turns its eye on such precise planetary coordinates as salt, rain, gold, war, beauty, loss, and grief, this tensile work plaits our dubious human inclinations into the sustainingyet complicated gifts of recognition, comradeship and obligation.”

 

Joyelle McSweeney, author of “Death Styles”

“To read Carr’s Turning at a time of war and collapse is to lean into the experience of dissolution that defines many of our breaths these days. In the book’s labyrinth, we turn and turn and turn, toward and away, visiting and revisiting the enmities and kinships, within and without, that we have inherited and will pass on to others to inherit. We gather with phantoms—of past, present, and future—to cut deeper and deeper into the fake semblance of any quiet that may be left. The reflections in the mirrors will offer no resolution; only the heavy intimacy of forever continuous killings and birthings. Carr reminds us that all we can do is bear with grace as we keep Turning.” 

 

Poupeh Missaghi, author of “Sound Museum”

“Carr is an alchemist of attention who is turning our reactionary apathy about the disorienting collapse of democracies into a conscientious experiment in documenting our subjection. In Turning, she undertakes the Jewish practice of teshuva—atonement, teaching, repentance—as an ethical act of self-transformation through the careful, attentive work of poiesis. This is a reorienting book written in the wake of an ongoing genocide in Gaza, by a Jewish American poet who looks us in the eye and asks us how we will rebuild what we have destroyed, at home, elsewhere, and within us, how will we justify the violences that sustain our lives. ‘Kinship,’ Carr writes, is ‘a to-be-found.’ It is a practice of considering what we owe each other, from Auschwitz to Khan Yunis, from Columbine to Parkland, so we do not merely survive the rubble in one generation to manufacture it in another. Turning is a devotional, meditative collection thrumming with a sprawling, documentary impulse that enacts the rebuilding of a conscience, for those who have suffered exile, and for those who must return to our final home: our accountability to each other.”

Divya Victor author of “CURB”