At last, on leave from the university for a few weeks, I'm catching up, and it's such a pleasure to revisit these appreciative reviews of The Weather in Normal. In Poetry Review, James Byrne reviewed TWiN alongside Forrest Gander's brilliant Be With (Norton, 2018), beginning, "Intimacy in lyric poetry requires the conjuring of absence." Byrne continues, "Both poets deploy a deeper lyric communion with the notion of absence itself; sometimes the dead speak back, are not merely

The first sighting was on Sarah James' blog, with these good words: "The poems in Carrie Etter’s The Weather in Normal (Seren) are powerful compressions, beautifully whittled onto the page, where the white space allows each line to unfold to way more than its literal size and force. Family, place and climate change are all set in even sharper focus by the crafted space between the lines – for thought, emotion, linking – that gives each image, each word choice, each evoked emo

It seems that much of my life as a poet has involved waiting. First it's waiting for responses to submissions to magazines (and many US magazines routinely take six months now). Next, submissions of pamphlet/chapbook and book manuscripts. Following that, there's the wait for reviews.... When my latest chapbook, Scar, was published last June, I was especially nervous and eager about reviews because it was such a different work for me: a single long poem that used the space of

The excitement of 2016 for my writing largely consisted of the publication of two pamphlets: Hometown (V. Press), a collection of flash fictions; and Scar (Shearsman), a single long poem exploring the effects of climate change on Illinois. Each has received a couple of reviews, and I hope more are still forthcoming. I wish more places reviewed pamphlets, but so it goes! After having teaching relief that reduced my load in the 2015-16 academic year and completing much more wri