BOOKS

Praise for The Hungriest Stars:

“The Hungriest Stars finds its epic ambition in deadly flower arrangements, domestic life revealing its mythos, and Plutonian astrology culling death and light to configure its own future. In this collection, shadows writhe with verdancy, petals from a paradise that cannot be trusted and promises that fail. This is the song in the wreck of cancer, in not-yet children pollinated yet concerning, and in the beautiful violence that is animal and poison: ‘We’re pealing in the deep black of the witching hours and the ones who love the light more than anything cower. They are afraid.’ Listen, then join.” —Phillip B. Williams

“At the heart of Carey Salerno’s The Hungriest Stars is the tension between ‘our desire to know and our actual knowing, one a delight, the other a disaster.’ There is also a vivifying tension between eros and intellect in these unstoppably garrulous poems. The speaker’s effusiveness betrays a haunting dread and understanding of forces beyond her control even as it attests to her powers of observation, rumination, and almost ecstatic divination. ‘Don’t summon me to your radiant unknown,’ the speaker says in ‘Annual Scans (The Procrastination Run).’ Salerno’s lush language—language in a rush—and her many formal inventions carry us right inside a mind racing past ‘dreamy stupor’ into sheer lightning and other negotiations with hope.” —Catherine Barnett

“Life cycles brittle or resilient leave traces of their flexing ongoingness in these pages, written on a bed of wild, lush growth and standing in fragrant, sensory meadows that make us weep and rage and set mind to. The micro-universe of reproductive processes, with chaos, void, and hope orbit like distant planets that never communicate the way humans expect them to. Poet Salerno’s steely or wild wit is delightful (a poem about paradise is concrete and collage.) Her talkiness reveals, spare images also reveal, while spilling-over scenes of medical grief and torment anchor. A reader is caught hearing, overhearing, listening in on, and breathing in sync with this voice. To read each poem is to breathe in new atmosphere: medical space, flowers, galaxies, responsibility, disconnection, home, microcosm, re-creation, endurance, corporeality. Imaginative, womanly divinity is in there, too, a sparkle and glow even in the coldest of exam rooms. Salerno’s work here is fertile with ingenious precision and song-like longing. She goes deep into the most brutal systems (productive, reproductive, social, ideological) and finds a rhythm to try to work it all through her own system, to understand. These poems circle the cycles, experience the imagined, and suffuse uncertainty with sustaining love. These poems, for all their recognition of pain and alienation, also somehow remember that each breathing moment contains itself, always, and there is some deep, strange comfort there. What a beautiful, heartbreaking, brilliant book.” —Brenda Shaughnessy

Praise for Tributary:

“Tributary by Carey Salerno is a beautiful book of river, within river, against river as metaphor, as life force, as faith. Salerno skillfully oscillates within and without the river—refracting it, lifting it up to the light, and using it as a force to deconstruct family, societal, and racial failings. The speaker in these poems both denies and wants the river. In poem after poem, Salerno layers thought after thought onto the river until it overflows. A radiant dissent rises in the end. Dexterous, relentless, and edifying, these are exploding and gorgeous poems of unapologetic rebellion.” —Victoria Chang, author of OBIT

“In Tributary, Carey Salerno calls us into the urgent relevance of myth. The story of Babel becomes a family story, each member, in the aftermath of a family breakup, dispersing into a different idiom. Alert to how our ways of speaking whitewash over intention, thought, and feeling so we cannot see ourselves, or be seen by others, Salerno’s lyrics forge new linguistic pathways, gorgeously mixing diverse rhythms of time: rituals circle; the self seems to progress; the river dries up, then overflows in unpredictable cycles; myriad tangled stories branch out from the past. To enter this collection is to enter a new kind of communal gathering that asks us to hear real relation: of a river, for example, to a human voice.” —Mary Szybist, author of INCARNADINE

“Salerno delivers a bold, memorable, and capacious collection.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Carey Salerno’s Tributary concerns the prescriptive strictures and silencing imposed by the patriarchal extremism… Salerno embodies in the text the emotional and spiritual torque by which her narrator transforms frustration into forgiveness…” –Lisa Russ Sparr, Los Angeles Review of Books

“This idea of narrative truth came home for me while reading Carey Salerno’s Tributary, a collection of poems symphonized by an omniscient, mystic river…. . the speaker of Salerno’s poems, us[es] the metaphor of the river to deconstruct epigenetic systems of patriarchy, whiteness, and religion.” –Naheed Patel, Public Books

Praise for Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books:

“Alice James Books is one of the pure sources of American poetry. . . [the press] has started the careers of too many poets to name. This anthology is a birthday celebration in book form. . .” —NPR

“The history of American poetry is the history of the small press, and Alice James Books, true to its origins in the Seventies as a collective operation, is a large and very distinctive chapter in that history, well deserving of this anthology showcasing its poets and work, both experimental and traditional, that ranks among the most important of the past four decades. The next time a student poet asks me for an anthology that will teach her the art in its most exemplary and current state, this is the one I will hand her.” —B.H. Fairchild

“The founding members of Alice James Books welcomed me, in 1975, to a crew of feisty individuals committed to poetry. Unfettered by demands of market or profit, the press published—for forty years— tantalizing collections. Culture; family; feminism; friendship; history; passion; racism; war: it’s all in this anthology, a rewarding testimony to the independent spirit.” —Robin Becker

“The list of authors is remarkable for its breadth, variety, and passion. This is a big book: a reader needs fortitude to undertake its 207 pages, but anthologies are meant to be sipped, not gulped thirstily…I have downed the entire collection, 130-odd disparate celebratory, elegiac, lyrical, lofty, comic, surreal, imagist, formalist, postmodern bards. The assortment is idiosyncratic, the range of voices an styles embraces the familiar personal narrative voice and the innovative, often dissonant music of more experimental poems.” —Maxine Kumin

Praise for Shelter:

“…Salerno unfolds a story that we cannot stop reading—though…the bare truth on the page hurts… This first collection takes courage to read, but you can bet it took more courage to write, and we should be glad Salerno did it.” —Library Journal

“…this is real poetry, millennial poetry…[it] links our humanity to the way we treat animals we don’t want… Shelter is a hard book to read, but the lessons humans need aren’t always easy.” —The Bark Magazine

“In a volume as compassionate as it is unsettling, Carey Salerno questions the moral authority assumed in the narrow confines of the animal shelter. Abu Ghraib haunts these lines as the shelter takes on harrowing, allusive dimensions, and as the narrator weighs her burden of complicity. Shelter is filled with fierce and desperate yowling, much of it our own.” —Michael Waters