Without Ceremony

"Angela Carr's words in Without Ceremony point their arrows toward a ledge where communication knows "both failure and perfection at once". Her poetry isn't invested in naming things (perhaps this is what is unceremonious) because things, even thingness, and their energies change so rapidly. Carr creates a field of verb-rich arriving where confessional exasperations are tried and transformed in pleasurable abstraction. She summons other women poets and artists (Hesse, Dickinson, Mitchell) not to revere them but to create a queer chorus of those who can bring us to see that what seems holy is simply ordinary." -- Stacy Szymaszek, author of A Year From Today
"Angela Carr's poems spark a startling immediacy directly to the heart of everyday encounters and how poems form "under the moment of language." Her work gives us the rare and complex gift of how to move out of the house of regret amidst the instability of the contemporary. Here in Without Ceremony are interior conversations with the likes of Lucretius, Dickinson, Moorman, that show how readers become writers and how words feel when put on us by others, which ones we choose to wear, which to strip off. Let Without Ceremony become one of those books "that are familiar as friends," always present to puncture through the space of the day to the intimacy we need to construct joy, a holding area for the moving moment." -- Lee Ann Brown, author of Other Archer