Second Nature

Poetry. "'Windows slam shut, like widows, or stones'—these poems carry a braid of unspoken stories. Visionary, honed, distilled, charged with the immediacy of a dream before you coax it into a story and the challenges of our baffling history, Patricia Carlin's poems remind me—entirely on their own terms—of the intimate 'you must change your life' urgency of the Duino Elegies. Carlin's lines ride on the breath, vulnerable to their own insight—'before this life we were together / and never now again'—and her eloquence has an edge of silence. SECOND NATURE is stunning work."—D. Nurkse

"SECOND NATURE usually means a notion along the lines of 'instinctive,' and Patricia Carlin's poems always are prodigiously accomplished in this rare sense —casually (if not effortlessly) deft, smart, stylish, consummate, and winning. But, range a little farther, and SECOND NATURE also intimates another nature beyond our everyday rival pasts ('a life gone missing'), or alternate futures ('This is not the body I will die in'). SECOND NATURE is a brilliant, dauntless, and ensorcelling book."—Robert Polito

"As though we're never quite sure which identical twin we're meeting, the world in these poems is both 'known' and 'unknown,' a 'somewhere' and a 'nowhere.' SECOND NATURE is a book of deep retrospection and preparation, breathtaking in its scope and maturity."—Susan Wheeler