Elegy for the Floater

Teresa Carson, the youngest of ten in a blue-collar family, unflinchingly writes about her chaotic past about which she had been taught to keep silent – her mentally ill mother, her enraged and abandoning father, her schizophrenic brother, her rape at fourteen, and her long-term relationship with a married man. It is her brother’s suicide that makes the poet aware of how dangerous shame-filled silence can be, and it is his suicide that pushes her to find her voice. Throughout, the poet chronicles her struggle to come to terms with the range of emotions she feels for her brother – including “bad” ones, such as her relief when he dies – and to understand why he committed suicide.

Teresa Carson holds an MFA in Poetry and an MFA in Theatre, both from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Elegy for the Floater (CavanKerry Press, 2008); My Crooked House (CavanKerry Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Congress of Human Oddities (Deerbrook Editions, 2015). She is a co-founder of the Unbroken Thread[s] Project, which explores how histories/myths/memories are excavated, interpreted, transformed and transmitted. A fairly new resident of Sarasota, Florida, she works to bring poetry to everyone in Sarasota County through her Poetry in Un/Expected Places project, which involves collaborations with artists from all genres.

These words – these poems – convey with beauty and power the emotions that pour from loss, love, trauma, reconciliation and healing … In these sometimes raw, sometimes funny, always powerful poems – one an connect to a fragment of the pain, and hope, of Teresa Carson. A moment of clarity; an image; a sensation evoked from her words can teach …. Teresa Carson is wise. She shares her wisdom in this remarkable book. Thank you for your life, Teresa Carson. Thank you for your words.
— Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD – The Child Trauma Academy

These poems can be harrowing. Ten children, two troubled parents. The speaker’s own excesses and catastrophes. But always the author’s relentless honesty, clarity, understatement, humor, and skill keep the poems from tipping into the abyss of self-pity….By writing this book, Teresa Carson has rescued her family (as much as a family can be rescued). That a book of poems can do this is a miracle. For which I am grateful.
— Thomas Lux

In admirably clear, tough-minded poems, Teresa Carson strips the masks from family and personal histories to expose terrible truths. But these poems of nightmare and survival are not out to shock us. Over and over, with with and tenderness, they bear witness to deep, inexhaustible love.
— John Larkin

February 2008
88 pp
Trade paper – 6 x 9.25
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-07-5
LaurelBooks