Mantle

C.S. Carrier’s Mantle hurls, into the whirring gears of history and language, love, mythos, divinity, manifest destiny, genealogy, and faith, the human body becoming a transistor of their writhing currents: “electrons mashed & applied to [the] mouth.” The four sections of this collection deploy mantle – cloak, cerebral cortex, earth stratum – in a prolonged negotiation/interrogation of the past and the bodied experience of it, as Brother Grammar and Brother Testosterone mouth promises and threats: “Here’s your land….And your voice”; “what I wants between her thighs.” This collection, like “a painted canary tagged with a radiotransmitter” signals from the mine, warring, warming, in “the dark fertile / alphabet rarefied.” Marthe Reed C.S. Carrier is a poet of the American Deadpan. That is to say, he carries in his words a long history folding over the silent voices of tomorrow in complex verse. His work contains within it Williams, Myles, Whitman, Dickinson, and Tate. It is also his own voice, gorgeous and wild, stretching forth throughout the plains like the brilliant lands of words he sings to us. Mantle is a book that you must read. Upon reading it, I knew that I was in the midst of a poet who contained multitudes, who with teeth “sore from the alphabet,” in the name of “Conduit,” could make Death grow “whitehot.” These poems are brave and important poems. It is not so much that Carrier is a seer in them, but is a poet who gives language a reason for being a thing at all. Or more to say, Carrier is a poet who makes language matter. These poems matter. Read them. Dorothea Lasky