Figeater

Winner of the John Ridland Poetry Prize.

In Andrea Carter's powerful Figeater, "we follow the/road, the terrible invention// of hope" until we reach the place where desire stretches the limits of what a heart can endure. Like Jupiter's great storm, this collection is "a constant/ hurricane, grasping, expanding, / feeling for a purchase, stability, / a place to collapse, fall apart, re-/accumulate." What abundant, soulful, heartwork.

-Tomás Q. Morín

In Figeater, Andrea Carter shows herself to be a master of extended metaphor and the lyric. The book chronicles abuse, abandonment, betrayal-the men often seeing someone else, the mother as wicked queen-"I am a moving violation" says the speaker-trapped with "no one to release me from my glass coffin." There is emptiness and hunger here-"No one will know//the hunger of us." The central reveal is scattered like breadcrumbs throughout the book: "I looked more like/an adult even at ten, and my body//belonged to my stepfather." In a key poem, "The Welder," the speaker is likened to Hephaestus, metal worker to the gods-"the daughter is [...]/the conjoining joint, testament//between her mother/and the man her mother sends/her daughter to//in order to make him happy." Figeater is a blistering, deeply felt tribute to Carter's ability to open a coherent and difficult world with language both lush and sharp. It is beautifully wrought.

-Donna Spruijt-Metz