Pamela Hobart Carter’s new poetry book, Held Together with Tape and Glue is a collection of gentle meditations, mostly on ordinary topics. Some of the poems are erasure poems, but I couldn’t tell which if I hadn’t read the acknowledgements in the front of the book. There’s no flaunting of technique here, but the poems are very assured.
Consider the opening of “Relined”:
Look at the world as if for the first time
Beside us rivers A sense of passage
to carry your self into its next version.
Or “On the Word”:
Here we are. On the page. On the word. On the dot or the hook or the serif.
Here we are. In the big city. In this house. In this room or the kitchen. Here lies truth.
Truth lies, here on the sofa, with us, with our feet are up, stocking-footed,
Pamela Hobart Carter, WRITER 