One Sleeve

As visceral as cerebral, Carr's narrator picks scabs off his philosophical wounds while his alter ego, One Sleeve, attempts to make sense of a fractured universe. The narrator seems innocent enough, but grows in power with each philosophical counterpoint to One Sleeve's nihilistic vision. Though the character One Sleeve seems implacable at first, his frailty gradually becomes apparent. "Irony is the new certainty," declares Carr's ambivalent narrator, caught between the physical sensations and philosophical problems of this world and the next. – David Hulm, Kirkwood Community College, Iowa City

Richard Carr's fifth book, One Sleeve, collects all the resonating themes of his earlier work, turbocharges them, and demands that the reader, stripped of all pretense, illusion, and self-pity, face the human condition of our time. Carr's fencing match with contemporary loneliness results in this dangerous, shining, torqued exploration of the most profound dualities that haunt the soul: faith and despair, infinity and nothingness, inevitable death and the heart-breaking beauty of even the smallest details of our world. The collection is narrative, yet surprising simile and a blunt lyricism generate a magic that catapults each poem beyond the everyday into the heart of metaphysics. – Nancy White, author of Sun, Moon, Salt and Detour

Who is speaking? Who is being spoken to? We expect a piece of writing—poem, novel, whatever—to answer those questions early on, but the very first poem in Richard Carr's sequence One Sleeve announces that this book will not be playing by those rules. "He thinks of himself in the third person / except sometimes when he talks. // I talk between people. / I aim for the space between passersby." Breaking the rules allows One Sleeve to speak with/as a protean voice (an I, a he, a dog, a rabbit, a satyr, a human chess piece, an ape, a cat, a fern garden) that makes him always multiple: when he is "a radical at his computer," for instance, he is so in the chemical and mathematical senses of the word "radical" no less than in the political sense. That protean voice also incites us—we passersby—into remaining, like One Sleeve, "awake, counting beams of snowlight / hovering in the slats of the blinds." – H. L. Hix, author of First Fire, Then Birds