Abigail Carroll

Habitation of Wonder Abigail Carroll

Habitation of Wonder is an offering of poems that travels the intersection of the natural landscape and the landscape of spirit. Here, the moon is a ""white comma / in the breath of space."" Crocuses are ""ephemeral prophets, first of the sun's spring projects."" The ocean is ""a vast / perpetual sacrifice on the altar / of the shell-glittering shore."" The collection opens with ""Genesis,"" a reimagining of the creation story with song as the divine instrument of creation. Five themed sections flow from ""Genesis"" like a musical thread, investigating the material elements from which we originate and in which we take shelter, as well as the gifts of language and faith, which make us more than merely ""a constellation of salts."" In its own way, each poem invites the reader to ""tenant beauty""--as well as to tenant uncertainty. When beauty and uncertainty collide, they spark wonder. As these poems suggest, wonder is simply another name for the world in which we live--and the world that lives in us. ""'In this life, ' Abigail Carroll writes, 'we could use a little more/beauty.' Fortunately, Carroll has gifted us that beauty with this spectacular volume of poetry. In poems whose sounds audaciously zip and leap about the page, Carroll finds her creed in both nature--mountains, weeds, elephants, the 'liturgies/of the waves'--and in language itself, locating in the letter m and in commas proof of God's handiwork and the world's sanctity. These swirling poems exemplify the lyric as song, and in poetry's ability to restore the reader's wonder in 'the imminence/of winter, the free enterprise of grace.'"" --Anna Silver, Author of From Nothing and Second Bloom Abigail Carroll lives and writes in Vermont. She is author of A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim (2017) and Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal (2013).