Attention instructors and those in Book Clubs:

Carol Ann is happy to speak/Skype/Zoom with you! Download a free reader’s Guide here.

Music to read by:

Listen to the playlist Carol Ann compiled to accompany the book at largeheartedboy.com. Link is here.



Carol Ann in conversation:

Listen to an interview on the Yale Radio Hour. Link is here.

About Atlas Hour

Like the bound collection of maps for which the book is named, the poems in Atlas Hour outline and delineate the borders of thought about subjects as seemingly unconnected as art, suffering, parenthood, language, and faith.  Inside these poem-maps, images serve as legends, and descriptions of the paint on the brush or the words of a saint form borders, and each point on the map leads one deeper into that hour of contemplation reserved for secret, intimate address with oneself.  What’s found is a terra incognita of the intellect and the heart; the poet is no more guide than fellow traveler, one who notices the wind on the neck or notes the bells that toll the hour of departure.

In the face of the bounteous disorder that accumulates from acute observation, a disorder of that-which-cannot-be-mapped, the noting of detail begins to take on the cast of spiritual practice, so that a faith in the accretion of detail is central to the way in which the book accumulates meaning—perhaps this is the only kind of faith that survives the confrontations with genocide, torture, and suicides that must take place in the hour before the school bus arrives or on the dusk walk home from the pool.  The sense that these events are in some way simultaneous and interconnected—that each of us is both the angel and the devil in the painting—haunts not just the poems describing medieval illuminations but also the “useless hours” a family spends flying a kite. The poet’s efforts at ordering lead to the revelation that “disorder’s me, I’m the object turning in the light.”  It turns out each of us, reader, writer, poet, child, artist, is that object turning in the light of perception and language both.

About Psalm

By way of a narrative arc, Psalm is a collection of poems that takes the poet from her father’s death to her son’s birth. In between are all the elements of the imagination: faith, art, music, culture. This world expands to include Vermeer’s nuns, Cornell on a bike ride on the Brooklyn promenade and the sound of Django Reinhardt all simultaneous to her son’s cries, his presence. The poet moves forward inside and then away from grief. Her lyric poems begin to furnish the afterlife, even as they do the time before birth.

Read more about Psalm at Tupelo Press