Here Versus Elsewhere

Here Versus Elsewhere by Allison Carter N.B. Ghosts are cameras photographing a smaller space, then a bigger space around it. The space has people in it. I, like you, am crazy about ghosts, just as they are about us. Their movements can be sudden and empathetic, with incision of nail, through a space, above or below, holding a hand, you suddenly discover a sandy interior, moving through a sensory deprivation experience, I took your hand and felt it slip from the room, when, if ever, do I get to - does anyone get to - proceed? They can be left, right. By yourself or lonely. On the road or through the meadow. With internal logic, as a cat. I turned my back just once to the empty space in my bedroom and now I have a ghost named Christopher. "Allison Carter's narratives are virtuostic in craft and scope. Her quiet, simple lines betray a pressure and seem to boil at times. There is universal truth: 'And then the zeitgeist we/became strictly inseparable/or so I thought.' There is also great humor and precision, 'But babies come from many places/and they are easy to grab at/through the rattling branches.' Her poetry is an all-around pleasure to read, and it stays with me, like a consoling friend."-Noelle Kocot "Human echolocation is an ability of humans to detect objects in their environment by sensing echoes from those objects. Deploying complex language-polyrhythmic, repetitive, reverberant, resounding-with an eerie proficiency, Allison Carter's writing performs a kind of linguistic human echolocation that articulates, navigates, and wayfinds space-physical, relational, emotional, and otherwise...-all within a network of deceptively familiar frames. In her new book, Here Versus Elsewhere, it is the accumulation of emptinesses, expertly and intentionally drawn, that definitively interprets the boundaries of the spaces the reader occupies as well as the nature of the entities, human and otherwise, that serve as persistent companions within those selfsame spaces."-Harold Abramowitz Allison Carter is the author of A Fixed, Formal Arrangement (Les Figues Press) as well as several shorter collections, including Sum Total (Eohippus Labs), All Bodies Are The Same and Have The Same Reactions (Insert Blanc Press), Shadows Are Weather (Horse Less Press), and We All Are Worried About Repeating Mistakes That I Have Already Made: Breakfast Poems, forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She writes and works in Los Angeles, CA.