In Catherine Carter's The Swamp Monster at Home, classical sirens sing from a Chesapeake Bay island; Adam and his lover, Steve, share beers in Eden; and a Norse goddess strides into an emergency room, "glowing like grain." With quirky imagination and wry humor, Carter exposes the connections between human and nonhuman, blood and home.
Building from The Memory of Gills, Carter's debut collection and winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, these vivid and tender poems consider the immanent and sometimes animistic natural world. The Swamp Monster at Home, however, takes new risks, offering a deeper vulnerability and greater maturity; this new collection acknowledges the loves within and outside of marriage and confesses to both the grief and relief of miscarriage. Varied in form, The Swamp Monster at Home offers accessible and rewarding, elegiac yet hopeful poems — an exciting new collection from a remarkable writer.