Second Nature

Poetry. "'Windows slam shut, like widows, or stones'--these poems carry a braid of unspoken stories. Visionary, honed, distilled, charged with the immediacy of a dream before you coax it into a story and the challenges of our baffling history, Patricia Carlin's poems remind me--entirely on their own terms--of the intimate 'you must change your life' urgency of the Duino Elegies. Carlin's lines ride on the breath, vulnerable to their own insight--'before this life we were together / and never now again'--and her eloquence has an edge of silence. SECOND NATURE is stunning work."--D. Nurkse

"SECOND NATURE usually means a notion along the lines of 'instinctive, ' and Patricia Carlin's poems always are prodigiously accomplished in this rare sense --casually (if not effortlessly) deft, smart, stylish, consummate, and winning. But, range a little farther, and SECOND NATURE also intimates another nature beyond our everyday rival pasts ('a life gone missing'), or alternate futures ('This is not the body I will die in'). SECOND NATURE is a brilliant, dauntless, and ensorcelling book."--Robert Polito

"As though we're never quite sure which identical twin we're meeting, the world in these poems is both 'known' and 'unknown, ' a 'somewhere' and a 'nowhere.' SECOND NATURE is a book of deep retrospection and preparation, breathtaking in its scope and maturity."--Susan Wheeler