Open and read Julie Carr’s finely wrought Equivocal. Such intimate, ambitious, impeccable, evocative writing!”—Carol Snow
"Deeply concerned with her relationship with her mother, children, and god, the speaker in the poems returns again and again to the mysteries, frailties, and intensities of all three of these relationships."—American Poet
"As the pages turn, the book captivates with images that make connections of their own...and its sounds...stay with us long after the book is closed."—Library Journal
"The stalwart energy, risky invention, and luminous intelligence of this book make the air clearer, the world lighter, and give company to those who grieve."—Jean Valentine
"It is nothing less than thrilling to see the delight, the pain, the opposition, the contradiction, the logic and the illogic of the mysterious, unlanguaged correspondences between mother and child, child and mother, and then adult and mother meet such a fierce intelligence. And there is brilliant formal invention. Like nativity itself, all seems eternally spun on end."—Gillian Conoley
Carr's second collection (after Mead: An Epithalamion) gives us an intimate and highly lyrical exploration of personal realms and boundaries of self: "this, the condition of breathing." Carr approaches the "pain of things as they are"; her strongest poems seem to arise when she is most deeply possessed by her investigation of the self's beginnings and growth. As the pages turn, the book captivates with images that make connections of their own ("child walks upstairs on all fours like a cat"), and its sounds ("the murmur in my wedding ring") stay with us long after the book is closed. Most moving, however, is its strangeness and, somehow, openness. Carr's is clearly a voice of tender lyricism and much intimacy, yet it is never obscure. She is also unafraid to be strange—not for the strangeness's sake, as is (unfortunately) the case with many of her contemporaries—but because her word combinations strive to investigate our every moment on this planet: "in rain, with knees like water,/our son falls." A beautiful book; recommended for all poetry collections.
—Ilya Kaminsky
