HELD TOGETHER WITH TAPE AND GLUE by Pamela Hobart Carter

Like a gull or osprey, or even, a cloudhorse, the poems in Pamela Hobart Carter’s Held Together with Tape and Glue move with grace, drama and purpose. “Patterns are easier to see from the sky” she writes in “Notice,” and thus these poems soar and swoop through meditations on reality and perception, on preparation and change, on doing or not. Don’t let the title fool you: these poems are not makeshift or rickety. They are shiny, sleek feathered movements from the pages to our minds.

–Ben Kline, author of Sagittarius A* and Dead Uncles

Pamela Hobart Carter‘s Held Together with Tape and Glue holds the reader in a “kingdom of velvet and silver and lost jewelry,” a place where “wavelengths of imagination” reach toward “the whole ocean of dreamed life” in all its vivid strangeness. These poems dip into a palette rich in philosophical reflection—“How did we get so good at calendars and clocks,/still ignorant of true passage?”—and they engage with the art of other poets through erasures and ekphrastic poems. The lyrical moments, insights, and visual acuteness of these poems make Carter a poet well-worth traveling with.

–Priscilla Long, author of Holy Magic and Crossing Over: Poems

Pamela Carter’s exquisitely original new collection of poems is a great deal more cohesive than its title, Held Together with Tape and Glue. Honed by her scientific training as a geologist, Carter’s keen observations dissect the “everydayness” of living from genus to species, from one daily version to the next, and from one epiphany to another. She is “the shrewd detective in a village” where she combines the mythic with the scientific in a Blakean universe where a constant self-becoming rules.

–Koon Woon, poet and publisher of Goldfish Press