Sarah—of Fragments and Lines

As a piece derived from a unified whole, a fragment suggests a tiny shard of a story that must stand on its own and, in doing so, devise a new context for itself. In her newest book, Carr (Equivocal) deals with several threads of the personal: pregnancy, birth, death, and grieving. These events play out not as some progression that leads toward an inevitable resolution but as a transubstantiation of sorts, where the book's various fragments, lines, and abstracts occur simultaneously, with each assuming characteristics of the others. If such modes of composition demonstrate, as Carr writes, "no love for/ myself or for the narrative," it is only because our humanity pulls us in contradictory directions. For Carr, Sarah—the mother lost to Alzheimer's as Carr herself is expecting a baby—is the tension that exists between the remains of a remembered future and a past that hasn't happened yet.