Laurence Carr

  • Reflecting Pool: Poets and the Creative Process is an innovative volume of poetry and essays by twenty-five New York State poets who teach the writing of poetry, run poetry workshops and publish the poetry of others. The book is both a poetry anthology and an informal textbook with contributing essays by each poet that offers the reader personal insights and opinions about how poetry is created, crafted, and presented. Included are a wide array of prompts and exercises that these mentors use in their classes and workshops to stimulate the creative process in poets of all ages. Also added are basic ideas about how poets can best present their work in public readings. The book can be used as the focus for symposiums on teaching the writing of poetry as well as a textbook for high school and college students, adult and senior writers, and for those who run poetry workshops or reading series. 2018 | 172 pages
  • Poems of Remembrance A journey through time and place with stops to visit Madame Curie, Charlie Parker, Scheherazade, Madame Bovary, Lee Harvey Oswald’s coffin and God among others.
    2016 | 76 pages
  • An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers Riverine is a contemporary anthology of memoir, short fiction, and poetry by over seventy Hudson Valley writers. The memoirs reflect Hudson Valley life along with life outside the U.S. Intriguing short stories, both dark and light, explore a wide range of fictional characters. Microfiction (or flash fiction) brings the reader the razor-sharp genre of the short-short story and thought-provoking prose poems. Two poetry sections offer a wide array of styles from a diverse group of poets. "Hudson Valley Views" focuses upon the landscape of the valley that these poets call home. "Other Realms" journeys to the inner mindscape and takes the reader to places both real and imaginary. Riverine is the creation of writer and editor Laurence Carr along with Codhill publisher, David Appelbaum, former editor of Parabola magazine. Riverine celebrates the words of those authors who breathe the air of the Hudson Valley, drink its water, eat the harvest from its rich soil and convert these gifts into the gift of words that reflects our individual and collective lives. As long as a healthy Hudson River continues to flow through this valley (and part of our lives must be committed to its good health), the words of its writers will also continue to flow from lips and pens and pencils and keyboards.
    2007 | 314 pages
  • Microfiction set in, around and under the mythical town of Wytheport Sometimes angst-ridden, sometimes whimsical, sometimes meditative, these short "biographs" depict the life and times of a unique place and its haunting residents. The Wytheport Tales draws inspiration from a range of authors: Dante, Carroll, Joyce, Eliot and Masters, as well as fantasists such as Cabell, Eddison and MacDonald.

    " 'Time is warping in the palace,' Laurence Carr observes in The Wytheport Tales. And our nights and days are warping in these sly, canny (or are they uncanny?) poems. Most interested in the world when that world is changing, and by turns in-flected, de-flected, and re-flected, here fanciful, there matter of fact, Carr's tales summon twilight presences from the edges of experience, dark, restless, playful, and urgent."

    —Robert Polito, Director, New School Writing Program

    "Though it seems to begin in the land of Dylan Thomas's Nightwood, it extends beyond that into wonderfully evocative, mythic worlds that strike me as utterly original in its language and pace."

    —Robert H. Waugh, The Monster in the Mirror: Looking for H. P. Lovecraft

    "With The Wytheport Tales, Laurence Carr gives us a work that shimmers and twists, that undulates across the mind's eye like a tapestry. At times homely, at others baroque, at still others nightmarish, the collection fits multitudes between its covers. I'm eternally grateful to have been introduced to a sampling of Wytheport's denizens, and look forward to many return visits."

    —John Langan, Mr. Gaunt

    2006 | 54 pages
  • A Hudson River Anthology This anthology of contemporary poetry and memoir celebrates the Hudson River and its environs in all of its breadth and depth. It brings together sixty Hudson Valley writers who explore what it means to be part of one of America’s great river systems: to live near it and sometimes on it, to travel it by sail, steam, oar and motor, to swim it, to gather food from it, and to have it as a constant in one’s ever changing life. The book was created as part of the Hudson 400 Celebration, but we hope that it will stand for many years as a testament to those native people, explorers, immigrants turned locals, and visitors who made the river part of their lives, and ultimately, a place to call home.
    2010 | 131 pages
  • a Hudson Valley Story Pancake Hollow Primer is the story of Gulf War vet and drifter Frank Closky who finds himself on a physical and spiritual journey after he inherits an 1820's farmhouse in New York's Hudson Valley. At first indifferent to his ownership of "seven acres with a house, outbuildings, and all the contents within," Frank discovers a land where nature speaks it's ancient history, where ghosts and seers hold the past, and where he comes to find his place in a rock-laden piece of property and a house with no square corners. Inspired by writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, naturalist John Burroughs, and poets Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver, author Laurence Carr weaves together fiction, essay, and prose poem to create an insightful and often humorous tale of rural life and how an old house and its land can bring a broken person back to wellness.
    2011 | 180 pages
  • Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley This volume celebrates contemporary prose and poetry of more than a hundred women from New York's Hudson Valley. Writers from the Eastern border to the Catskills and along the length of the Hudson River evocatively address issues that touch not only women, but every reader who desires insight into the human experience. A Slant of Light is divided into five sections, each addressing a theme of women's lives. The book begins with Mythos, representations and revisions of myths on women. The second section, Body & Gender, explores visions of the body, gender socialization and the roles of women. The third section, Identity, examines both how women see themselves and how others see women. The fourth section presents women as parents, children, partners and lovers. The last, Woman in the World, shares works that meditate on our collective fate in a global world.
    2013 | 220 pages
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