Intervening Absence

Carrie Olivia Adams

Carrie Olivia Adams delves into a space defined by air and sky, each movement another scene of a movie re-filmed many times over. Intervening Absence, a series of sequences that question silence and interaction (and which both stand alone and themselves interact), is a work of strong architectural integrity populated by speakers whose vulnerability is extreme. Adams writes, “The poems wait, lie still. The poems creep and jump forward. The poems tense and relax their muscles. They interact with the unseen, the wished for, and the undeniably present. I can only hope that in their whispers to you they intervene.” These poems calmly announce a realm of interrupted conversations with the self as moving pictures projected on parlor walls, where Adams engages the idea of pause and distance.

“In Adams’ work, frames, boxes, envelopes, rooms, and buildings become especially prominent, signifying that which contains and limits. Yet we are also constantly reminded of the contingency of things, the thinness of the envelopes we occupy, as the structures of a city become vulnerable under the gaze of the speaker—

brown city roof-tops brace themselves for what may fall from the sky.
...
Plaster crumbles within the wall.
...
But the building bends under sleep.

Just as the landscape of her city buckles, the sense of order enforced by often end-stopped stanzas and lines is nicely disrupted by the ambiguities created by occasional syntactical fragmentation. . . . One sympathizes with Adams’ desire to interrogate, disrupt or even to transcend the stripped room frames her speaker exists in.” —Joseph Hall, Phoebe

“Clarity and alteration are at work in Carrie Olivia Adams’ first book, Intervening Absence, which seeks for the personal a frame or lens that is by turns philosophical and filmic.” —Lisa Fishman