Knight’s images are rich and abundant as she offers up a glimpse
of her place in time. — Barbara Hamby
110 Pages/Perfect bound
Carol Lynne Knight mingles scientific curiosity with stunning meditations on language, and the myriad ways life unfolds. There’s a rare and precious intimacy here, a sharp, smart humor, and a sense that we are in the wonderful presence of a truly original voice.
— Naomi Shihab Nye
Quantum Entanglement uses metaphors for physics to create a landscape that begins every day by driving to work with meditations on motion, including the space and time of her own erotic history. She is sinuous and adept with “the smoke of memory,” as she “sleepwalk(s) into the sixth dimension.” Her poems offer a landscape that is her own personal Last Picture Show, with boys in the backseats of cars, lovers meeting in motels, and meditations on the mistakes of an early marriage, as well as a compassion for the young teenage men she knew — those who went to war and lost so much. More substantial than nostalgia, they become repairs and atonements, revealing the reasons for her intrigue with entanglement.
— Diane Wakoski
QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT
If you measure love’s path,
pairs of electrons that spin ambiguously
suddenly become a marriage.
If I count the freckles on your back while you sleep, shine
a flashlight under the sheets, you wake and turn counter
clockwise — toward me, if I sleep on the left side
and dream that our love is quantified
with decimal points, even as it flees,
and touch mutates into observation.
If I tell you the world is flying apart, it could be true,
theoretically. But this morning the backyard green
rises, surrounds me with tendrils of prayer,
and the first woodpecker of spring drills
into the pecan tree outside the window.
Feathers on his red cap — so smooth.
28 Pages/Chapbook/Saddlestitched
In May 2019, Mary Jane asked about the Tallahassee heat from her apartment on the Via Ghibellina in Florence. It was still spring in Italy, chilly and gray — I responded with the poem, “Heat / Skyland Drive.” From this exchange, we decided to correspond during her stay in Italy with poems. We began with no expectations and no formal structure, just knowing we wanted to keep in touch through poems. Mostly, the writing played off the preceding poem in some way — but went in some surprising directions. Our foreign and domestic exchange follows. • CLK
THE MOON HIDES HALF ITSELF (MJR 6/14/19)
a murder of crows
could not keep me from walking
the cobbled stone road
which leads me towards
Botticelli’s Spring or the
Statue of David.
What I’ll miss back home?
two hour naps between class,
the tiny architecture
of ancient coins, of
Menerva and the Hydra,
Etruscan remnants,
red clay roof tiles,
la facciata of Rome,
gold in so many paintings.
vowels at the end
like Montepulciano
Chianti rooster,
black seal of assurance that
the grape is “the blood of Jupiter,”
echo our footsteps on
a quiet night off
the main road where the
moon hides half itself
in a Giotto blue sky.
Vasari’s swarming
people in pastels.
Carravaggio, a murderer.
HIS BRUSH OF RAGS AND FEET OF SORROW PERSIST (CLK 6/15/19)
Caravaggio, a murderer,
slides into my dream —
a tingle of blood, sword
or cat’s claw, a flash of pain,
a shadow, of course —
chiaroscuro, how else
to dream of him
or wake to my angry cat.
a murderer, if accidental,
persists with his sword,
or in this dream the graze
of a claw, does not
lay his weapon,
though his brush of rags
& feet of sorrow persist.
he fades into a deep
shadow, his fingers
stark, grasping a brush,
this dream of claw,
of waking blood.
& then in conversation that lasts
until the lot empties at 4 a.m. —
the deserted gravel,
the smoke-fed glow
of streetlights tracing
a fretted terrain,
like mars.
hydrangea wilting,
cats napping in the shade,
the last gardenia,
its brownish petals
soon to scatter,
late morning birds
cast single notes
lazily into the pines —
summer is ready
to saturate us with searing
heat & glorious light.
When we were not speaking,
I wondered how to tell you without words
where I was going, how I would walk
outside and breathe slowly to catch my heart before it raced into the swamp of singing
that prowls about us.
110 pages/Perfect bound
Carol Lynne Knight’s, A Fretted Terrain, Like Mars, is a lush evocation of a woman’s dance through her life — the romantic assignations in hotels and dilapidated houses to the full tango of a love affair in different cities and then the lone reckoning of the body and desire. The moon is the presiding goddess, or is it the phantasmagorical masks of a girl becoming a woman? This book is an unfurled fan — each slat a moment of beauty turning into a moving picture of love and loss. Knight’s images are rich and abundant as she offers up a glimpse of her place in time.
— Barbara Hamby, author of Bird Odyssey
Carol Lynne Knight’s, A Fretted Terrain, Like Mars, is a travelogue of desire bound for Paris, Las Vegas, Savannah, Rome, and back again. Sexual intimacy and spirituality confront mortality head-on. Surely, Eros and Thanatos are both at play in these poems, but Eros gets the upper hand, and Knight’s eye for the indelible detail, her open-hearted approach, her lyricism and lush imagery, make so many of these poems unforgettable.
— James Kimbrell, author of Smote
CHEVY IMPALA
— Nashville
meet me in nashville
where the bar is open late,
the music makes you sigh,
& drinks are two for one.
I’ll be leaning on the polished hood
of a ‘59 chevy impala convertible
parked inside the bar — the hub
of the prowl — & waiting
for a slow song so I can drape
myself on your muscled shoulder
& explore our mutual curves.
after the dance, we can make out
in the impala’s back seat,
& I’ll remember fred & mike,
but never ask the names you might recall
as the disco ball shatters above us.
later, we will run across the parking lot
as rain begins to sputter on cars,
to gutter & pool, & our bucket-seat-gear-shift-
semi-clothed attempts at intimacy
end in tangles of denim & laughter,
& then in conversation that lasts
until the lot empties at 4 a.m. —
the deserted gravel,
the smoke-fed glow
of streetlights tracing
a fretted terrain,
like mars.