Our List of Solutions

Poetry. Winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, Carrie Oeding's OUR LIST OF SOLUTIONS, masterfully utilizes voice to create personae of public selves set against a back drop of anxiety and personal longing that the speakers refuse to own up to. These vivid dramatic monologues get at the heart of human vulnerability, but they are anything (and everything) but soft spoken. Here, in this middle class world of barbecue grills and Mexican potato salad, the speakers are brazen, hyperbolic, frustrated, sarcastically euphoric, given to gossip, unbelievably funny, and often lonely. OUR LIST OF SOLUTIONS is a lacerating yet poignant picture of American culture and its attendant suburban angst.

"Carrie Oeding's speakers are so compulsively social and so comically anxious and irritable in their impatient yearning that their humanity comes alive; their dithery streaming flows from loneliness, from the separateness beneath loneliness. These women wield their gestures of mistrust, scorn and disappointment as fragile, provisional defenses against their own hungry romanticism. Revealing all this is a project whereby Oeding has attained an originality rare in contemporary poetry." Mark Halliday