Ground, Wind, This Body
This debut collection explores the vestiges of war and the effects those can have on a family. Carlson excavates the personal experience of violence and abuse that follows a traumatized soldier home and also reveals veins of redemption.
Carlson’s exquisite debut feels like a powerful woman has tossed a life preserver to a broken child flailing in the vast, tempestuous ocean of a brutal past.…The way Carlson faces abusive family history, war’s mental ravaging, and the search for transformation is courageous, authentic, and inspired.'—Booklist
In this book a brilliant new voice commands our attention. Tina Carlson’s poems take us by surprise, root us in their authenticity, and haunt us with their power.
Ground, Wind, This Body follows the crooked river of a family history, from the first fringes of memory where war is a cradle, through poignant songs that document the emotional violence where emerges the translucent beauty of a rainbow after a storm.
Tina Carlson is a psychiatric nurse practitioner at Albuquerque Health Care for the Homeless.
War Is a Cradle
Light-Years
War Is a Cradle
The Core
Ski Lesson
The House My Father Built
Girls with War in Our Blood
The Burial
Our Lives Aloft
Early-Morning Meditation
Instead of Light
Sin
A Span of Storm
Instead of Light
Perimeter of War
Inmates
Shapeshifters
The Blue Pool
The day my daughter
Summer Nights
Hometown Astronaut, 1962
Occupied Territories
Each Small Heaven
The Hunt
Occupied Territories
I Wish You Were Here
Midnight
The Medicine Woman Speaks of Suicide
Wild Wind
Let the World See
Still Missing
Gloss and Silt
Ojo Caliente: Metamorphoses
What Is Buried Turns to Gloss and Silt
You, Lover of Hills
On Not Drowning
Equinox
Mt. Taylor
Mirage
Promises of God and Mud
Mathematics of the Adopted Daughter
Small Girl and the Vastness
Embryo of Light
Acknowledgments
About the Author
