Out of Refusal

Poetry. In this book, poems compelled by the subjects of family history, parenthood, divorce, and the death of a brother become acts of witness and forgiveness. OUT OF REFUSAL to turn away from love and its inevitable loss, new ground is created: poems of lament become songs of creation. "OUT OF REFUSAL rises from the hardness of sorrow, from the glittering shards of grief, '… transforming / cold surfaces of what / is yet to be learned / into an offering….' These poems wrestle with profound absence and terrible loss, yet celebrate the hard-won knowledge '…that love is / out of all negatives / a shadow on the water of possibility / the soul of light and stones, what gives stones depth….' With moving trope and imagery, with resonant music, Carter gives us song that 'blooms from stone.'"—Paulann Petersen "The poems of Carter McKenzie's OUT OF REFUSAL map the difficult territory of a family's prejudice, children growing and turning away, a brother's death…. [W]hat we learn in reading these unsettling and often radiant poems is that change can and does occur as poem after poem forms a witness born out of what she cannot ignore and refuses to forget in a necessary and moving journey toward acceptance."—Maxine Scates "Her voices are both ordinary and extraordinary. Their telling lights up experience, the way Orion lights 'in the dark before morning…transforming the cold / as I see it / into companions.'"—Erik Muller "Grounded in the mysteries and solace of the natural world, replete with exquisite imagery and lyrical turns of phrase…these poems know '[I]t is never / over, cycles of sun and darkness.' Yet here is a poet who knows how 'to go out alone / on my own ship / every day,' offering us ways to live that are both resilient and transformative."—Alison Townsend