Conversations with a Dead Lover by Maryrose Carroll

The poems in Conversations with a Dead Lover, by Maryrose Carroll, are beautifully contemplative, yet deeply visceral. Addressed often directly, often peripherally, to her husband, the great American poet and editor, Paul Carroll, they take head-on the conundrum of love in its myriad guises. This is a book of breathtaking candor, the poet’s seemingly limitless threshold for apprehending a love intensely physical, but also mystical, of another plane, of nuanced touch and texture, a love that accrues only by abiding the earth’s lore and orbit, yet reckons that unseen world beyond our ken. Carroll’s language – at once stunningly plain and otherworldly as the bluest cloudless sky – ‘[joins] all [her] kin / whether dressed in silk or tatters.”

–Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14)