Julie Carr

“Deeply concerned with her relationship with her mother, children, and god, the speaker in the poems returns again and again to the mysteries, frailties, and intensities of all three of these relationships.” —American Poet “As the pages turn, the book captivates with images that make connections of their own…and its sounds…stay with us long after the book is closed.” —Library Journal “Open and read Julie Carr’s finely-wrought Equivocal. Such intimate, ambitious, impeccable, evocative writing!” —Carol Snow “The stalwart energy, risky invention, and luminous intelligence of this book make the air clearer, the world lighter, and give company to those who grieve.” —Jean Valentine “It is nothing less than thrilling to see the delight, the pain, the opposition, the contradiction, the logic and the illogic of the mysterious, unlanguaged correspondences between mother and child, child and mother, and then adult and mother meet such a fierce intelligence. And there is brilliant formal invention. Like nativity itself, all seems eternally spun on end.” —Gillian Conoley

In the wake of a mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s and a child’s impending birth, Julie Carr gathers the shards of both mourning and joy to give readers poems that encompass it all: “Zebra and xylophone cyclone and sorrow.” Here she says, “Since I lost her I stored her like ore in my / form as if later I’d find her, restore her,” giving voice to the longing that accompanies life’s most profound losses and its most anticipated arrivals.

Populism has become a global movement associated with nationalism and strong-man politicians, but its root causes remain elusive. Mud, Blood, and Ghosts exposes one deep root in the soil of the American Great Plains. Julie Carr traces her own family’s history through archival documents to draw connections between U.S. agrarian populism, spiritualism, and eugenics, helping readers to understand populism’s tendency toward racism and exclusion. Carr follows the story of her great-grandfather Omer Madison Kem, three-term Populist representative from Nebraska, avid spiritualist, and committed eugenicist, to explore persistent themes in U.S. history: property, personhood, exclusion, and belonging. While recent books have taken seriously the experiences of poor whites in rural America, they haven’t traced the story to its origins. Carr connects Kem’s journey with that of America’s white establishment and its fury of nativism in the 1920s. Presenting crucial narratives of Indigenous resistance, interracial alliance and betrayal, radical feminism, lifelong hauntings, land policy, debt, shame, grief, and avarice from the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era, Carr asks whether we can embrace the Populists’ profound hopes for a just economy while rejecting the barriers they set up around who was considered fully human, fully worthy of this dreamed society.-Author