What’s Left by Tate Lewis-Carroll

$22.99

Many poems are written about something, but the poems that move me most are those written for something, as with the poems in Tate Lewis-Carroll‘s aptly-titled What’s Left. What is left, the collection eloquently asks, when the beloved – in this case, the poet’s father – has vanished? To read these gorgeous elegies is to be invited into the vulnerable space of a young poet’s grief, and to speak back to the dead in the strange act of ventriloquism that occurs when one reads a poem. As Lewis-Carroll writes so eloquently in the “Acknowledgments” section: “And now, reader, my father belongs to you.” What a generous gift this dedication is, and what a beautiful testament this collection is to the ways in which art – perhaps art alone – offers us the chance to hold onto what matters most.

–Austin Smith

Tate Lewis-Carroll has done a rare thing—writing about death unflinchingly but with love, with a deft touch that traces their father’s body and life in their own but never exploits his pain. I was so moved by the artistry of these poems, their rendering of the specificities of loss, and I am impressed by their courage. These are awakened poems by a “noticing soul” who cannot close their eyes to the truth of life. What’s Left is a beautiful, generous book.

–Rachel Jamison Webster, author of September

In What’s Left Tate Lewis-Carroll attempts to grieve the death of his father, a father who, while sometimes loving, was often distant, already gone. By turns brutal and delicate, shocking and deft, Lewis-Carroll’s poems are operations, autopsies and exorcisms, that attempt to register the transformation of a shadowy, scintillating absent presence into one that, now, suddenly, will also always be so. This is critical and intensive work, and a bold and energetic debut.

–Michael Theune

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What’s Left

by Tate Lewis-Carroll

$22.99, Full-length, paper

979-8-88838-078-9

2023

What’s Left is a living record of Tate Lewis-Carroll’s dying father and the often estranged but sometimes idyllic relationship they shared. As urgently as the initial cancer diagnosis and death six months afterwards, this project began with startlingly raw poems written beside the father’s deathbed. Yet, upon uncovering the father’s wide-ranging nature photography, Lewis-Carroll is able to reexamine and finally relate to him in a way that had seemed unreachable in life. Obsessed by this act of excavation, Lewis-Carroll unpacks every eclectic box in an attempt to discover what’s missing, what’s sincere, and what’s left after death.

Tate Lewis-Carroll (they/them) is the editor of The 2022 Texas Poetry Calendar, serves as Poetry Editor for the Ocotillo Review, and edits for Kallisto Gaia Press. They’ve lived most of their life somewhere in the Midwest and now reside on a small farm in rural Illinois with their photographer wife, Izzy, and many animals. Find them on Instagram @tatelewiscarroll Twitter @tplpoetry or somewhere out in the woods, reading.

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