"A whirling lusty journey across our mis/anthropocene.. I wanna follow this polymath of the heart thru all the flowers and detritus." — Caroline Conway
"Unlike anything or anyone. Ravishing, irrepressible, maximalist, utterly astonishing." — Ari Banias, author of Anybody
who breathed a lily
and came into you claiming sanctuary
— "The Experience of Being a Cathedral"
On April 4, 2020, the New York Times reported the Cathedral of St. John the Divine was preparing to convert into a field hospital for Covid-19 patients. Though this might seem strange, noted the Dean of the Cathedral, cathedrals had historically been used this way. "So," he said, "this is not outside the experience of being a cathedral, it is just new to us."
The Experience of Being a Cathedral is a bit like that cathedral-turned-hospital, a messy congregation of griefs and joys. Mostly it's a trashy romance set in Lawrence Kansas against politically manufactured austerity and reckonings that can't quite be said to be personal. Sometimes it's torn out of the wind and translated into scripture. A Kansas dialect kicks up dust in "Morning After Halloween," taking the reader for a drive out into the mother tongue cadence. Now that route is relatively long, so if you don't have time you can cut across the fields via the title poem "The Experience of Being a Cathedral."
Read the ebook at Amazon, nook, Apple ibooks, Kobo, Google books, or complimentary pdf download at https://www.kerrycarnahan.com. A limited quantity of first edition paperback copies featuring cover artwork and design by Camilo Rojas-Lavado are available – email lettucerunbooks at gmail dot com.
Praise for The Experience of Being a Cathedral
"What if the one you first saw as a veiled woman by the flock of your bros came now however many centuries later to tell what she's seen flying in her house above the post-9/11 desert of the real. Yet this is no Little Ontology on the Prairie but what if poetry were now the cathedral converted into a hospital for the collective soul. What more do we need to trust god but "a lone butch disentangling earth from heaven under a naked bulb"? Not much but to be permitted into the wound that never asked to be a sigil in the first place. Kerry Carnahan writes like she knows."
— Ana Božičević, author of JOMO and Rise in the Fall
Content from the booklet and deluxe visual material are also available on instagram at experience.ofbeing.a.cathedral.
