Carrie Jerrell Q&A on her series of wedding sonnets
Carrie Jerrell talks about her series of wedding sonnets, including “The Ring“, “The Bridesmaid,” “The GroomÕs Cake,” and “The Recessional.”
Carrie Jerrell
Carrie Jerrell
Carrie Jerrell’s debut collection, After the Revival, received the 2008 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Waywiser Press. She received an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, a Ph.D. from Texas Tech University, and, in the fall of 2009, she will join the faculty at Murray State University as an assistant professor of English. […]
Big Daddy
Called me Hot Stuff. Called me Ragtop, Lugnut, your Deere-in-the-Driveway Duchess. Called forth Bad Company from the pick-up’s stereo and, lo, I appeared with a buck knife and a hundred-proof smile, my battered hunter’s manual tucked in the waistband of my cutoffs. What were we at first but two necks of the same guitar, high […]
The Poet Prays to Her Radio for a Country Song
O guardian of the well-lunged, purveyor of lies, enabler of the backseat horny, I am sorely afflicted. Traveling the long tongue of highway 40, I fear the bottomless black sky of loneliness has hawked me from the back of its throat and doomed me to land, wet and without notice, in the dust-bitten spittoon of […]
The Country-Western Singer’s Ex-Wife, Sober in Mendocino County, California
Somewhere back East my late love’s all coked up, another cowgirl wannabe lying at his feet while he plucks a Willie Nelson song from his beer-soaked six string and complains nobody understands a rebel’s broken heart. I’ve played her part, the star struck blonde in boots and denim mini, pert boobs, and brains to boot. […]
Plainsong
If you saw my footprints around the barn loft ladder, you would know I tie each bale with sisal twine and secrets. If you saw me kneel among cut sweetcorn stalks, you would know I hear vespers in the auger’s rush. If Red-tails scouted the warren’s edge, or murders called from their barbed wire roosts, […]
Nocturne
for Matthew Twenty-two, come from the underground, you’re through with the mine’s night shift and wear coal dust like vernix while playing Clair de Lune. Moths crowd the porch-lit screen door, and you’ve come to trust your ear for every chord. Dark note by note, how many hours you’ve searched for songs that burn like […]
The Ring
These days, you don’t just buy a solitaire. You look for flaws with magnifying loupes, check color grades, make setting choices: flared four-prong cathedral, ridged contour, or flutes of baguette accents down the sides. The bands, once standard 14k gold, now come in weapons-grade titanium. It stands to reason, one would think, as rings become […]