Mary Carroll-Hackett

Mary Carroll-Hackett (Poetry) | Farmville, VA

Booking Fee:

Negotiable

Will Travel:

Anywhere

Contact:

carrollhackettma_at_gmail.com

Website:

http://marycarrollhackett.com/

Mary Carroll-Hackett is the author of The Real Politics of Lipstick (Slipstream 2010), Animal Soul (Kattywompus Press 2013), If We Could Know Our Bones (A-Minor Press 2014), The Night I Heard Everything (FutureCycle Press 2015), and Trailer Park Oracle (Kelsey Books 2016). Another collection, A Little Blood, A Little Rain, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press in 2016. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in more than a hundred journals including Carolina Quarterly, Clackamas Literary Review, Pedestal Magazine, Superstition Review, Drunken Boat, The Prose-Poem Project, and Cultural Weekly among others. She was named a North Carolina Blumenthal Writer and winner of the Willamette Award for Fiction. Her chapbook, The Real Politics of Lipstick, won Slipstream’s 2010 poetry competition, and another, Animal Soul, was released in 2013 from Kattywompus Press. Mary founded and teaches in the Creative Writing programs at Longwood University and with the low-residency MFA faculty at West Virginia Wesleyan. She also teaches workshops on Writing through the Chakras, Writing the Spiritual Life, Writing Prayer, and Writing the Mother, at The Porches Writers Retreat, the WriterHouse, and through other venues in Virginia and North Carolina. Mary is at work on a memoir.

Books

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A Little Blood, A Little Rain (FutureCycle Press, 2016). Poetry.
The Night I Heard Everything (FutureCycle Press, 2015). Poetry.
The Night I Heard Everything (FutureCycle Press, 2015). Poetry.
If We Could Know Our Bones (A-Minor Press, 2014). Poetry.
If We Could Know Our Bones (A-Minor Press, 2014). Poetry.

Chapbooks

Trailer Park Oracle (Kelsey Books, 2016). Poetry.
Trailer Park Oracle (Kelsey Books, 2016). Poetry.
Animal Soul (Kattywompus Press, 2013). Poetry.
Animal Soul (Kattywompus Press, 2013). Poetry.
The Real Politics of Lipstick (Slipstream, 2010). Poetry.
The Real Politics of Lipstick (Slipstream, 2010). Poetry.

Press & Reviews

“Mary Carroll-Hackett’s work is alive with the language of the heart. It is angry, sad, celebratory, erotic, reverent and irreverent in equal degree. The voices on these pages are distinct, and human, and so accessible, you can see the whole world through the prism of these poems. Mary Carroll-Hackett wields the prose poem as a cudgel or a caress, as a song, or a meditation, a prayer or a curse. She is as fine an artist with this form as we have in our time.”
—Robert Bausch, author of Far As the Eye Can See, Almighty Me (optioned for film and eventually adapted as Bruce Almighty), A Hole in the Earth (a New York Times Notable and Washington Post Favorite Book of the Year), and Out of Season.

“This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender.”
—Jan Beatty, author of Red Sugar, Boneshaker, Mad River, and The Switching/Yard (University of Pittsburgh Press).

The wisdom in Mary Carroll-Hackett’s If We Could Know Our Bones spans the width of the universe springing from a moment in time. It spans time from its elemental beginnings to a contemporary couple bound in each other’s arms and legs as it has been since the beginning. She weaves the science of understanding and the magic of everyday living. We stand in wonder at the miracle and intimacy of nourishment and take sweet flight into the unknown and intuitive. These gems cut from words are earthy and heavenly, transcendent and rooted in the dirt of our becoming and our reckoning. These prose poems offer us shelter and meaning in the everyday, yet reach out to brush the hair back out of the face of the immortal as if to say, “God, let me see your eyes.” Intimate and strange they occupy a place thumping within the physical human heart and the other heart we cannot fathom. Read this book, friends, not for answers, but to have the birdshot of goose bumps pepper your flesh on a summer day and wonder at the shared breath you take now from the one taken by ancestors long dead. Reading Mary Carroll-HAckett’s work is like knowing the science of why you have goose bumps, but still in wonder to the mystery of how they are raised from the vapor of words. Mary Carroll-Hackett gives us concrete wonder like no other I know.
—Jerry D. Mathes II, author of Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire and Fever and Guts: A Symphony.


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