The central subject in Julie Carr's debut poem collection is marriage. Intimacy is examined, not only in terms of the erotic, the quotidian, and the contractual, but also in terms of the intertextual: the pact between reader and writer and the blending of texts that results. Motherhood also figures as a kind of marriage-a bond that includes affective, legal, and sensual elements.

Using a variety of poetic structures—prose poems, stanzaic forms, concrete poems, fractured lyrics, direct dialogue, and discursive modes—Carr simultaneously embraces and breaks from the expected and the known, revealing the precarious balance between our desire for narrative, sequence, drama, and resolution, on the one hand, and rupture, fragment, and fracturing, on the other.

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With 'face upon face rising out of the,' Julie Carr's stunning book-length epithalamion cracks open marriage and motherhood as if they were geodes, exposing the dazzle within, 'a spark / in the draft of the burning.' Its fierce lyricism both fractures and binds together, so that the outside and the inside take hands. This is a song well worth hearing again and again: 'Now all ring you ah.'

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Carr illuminates the marriage of the inner and outer worlds, often taking detours from sense and always taking them to interesting places, always landing somewhere deeply felt.

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Mead charts the vicissitudes of a marriage or a mind or the sentence. Change and flux govern each turn in this collection of domestic moments. Carr emerges us so completely into the dailiness of this form that even when it is threatened by the fantasy of dissolution we understand fantasy to be just another interruption defining the familial self. The representational language that governs the text becomes the necessary choice to prevent the obliteration of that self.

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In Mead, 'engender' is an anagram for 'endanger,' and the poet demonstrates that to be fearless is to inhabit one's fear with ardor. Be prepared, then, for this fierce and loving poetry. Carr avers that 'measure becomes 'direction, determined. Its function being to conjoin and so dissolve opposing forces.' Mead wrestles with these forces, taut on the continuum between terror and curiosity. The renewed proportion of Carr's measure makes a golden tightrope on which I gladly walk.