WHOSOEVER HAS LET A MINOTAUR ENTER THEM, OR A SONNET—

How does a love poet fall out of her marriage and back in love with the world? What happens when you grow up to be the “kind of person who…”? These fairytales are for the heartbreakers as much as the heartbroken, for those smitten with wanderlust, for those who believe in loving this world through art.

A singular flow of bewildered brilliance, Emily Carr’s swiftly flowing sequence of love poems—divorce poems, really—engages the very real problem of falling out of love because (admit it!) you never think you will. No matter how many times it’s happened before. Imagine it: not limiting love to the erotic but embracing endeavor, struggle, social change, and political action. Love as consciousness, inventiveness, and intention. In a world that hurts as much as it holds.

Carr’s swell of gorgeous psychedelia is presented in a lavish book-object befitting the work’s interconnected, page-defying sweep of line upon line:

between her thighs, the buffalo holding sky.
saucers of mountain sway. deities spill, shining & suffering …
not forgetting we can’t ever—whose fury sings like eagles—
skeletons unlean from fruit trees, falling
like white gunsmoke, we want/                                         to be here. listen.
the wind has blown all the birds from our hair.

Praise for Whosoever Has Let A Minotaur Enter Them, Or A Sonnet—:

“Emily Carr explodes our understanding of ourselves and what we might be doing here on this planet. The poet offers a new mythology for the world we go about acting as if we know. I need this book, and right now we all could use what this book freely gives us.”
—Dara Wier

“Carr unfurls a world shot through with the embodied spiritual, a universe numinous and immanent, replete with permeated mediation. The gods here float, as they did for Pound in the azure air.”
—Craig Dworkin

“A raw energy rips through these poems in language that refuses to land. Carr works her fabulous phrasing against a backdrop of the natural world caught on its own terms. The whole coalesces into vivid presence with everything at stake and the verve to address it.
—Cole Swensen

“Writing through slivered landscapes, this is verbal art delighting in its impossibility and showing us that those moments where connectives fail, we are tethered by something else.”
—Sandra Doller