Poetry chapbook
Finishing Line Press 2022
Spare language, compressed emotion–the power of the unsaid balanced against the exactitude of what is expressed–allow Barbara Siegel Carlson’s new poems to take on significant weight with each word, each jagged edge, shimmering with multiple meanings. Many of these poems reside in a moment of eternal brevity, in silent rooms, after the light has left, and in the stillness between sleeping and the dead / the flying and the feather that lies on the ground. Fragmented and reconstructing the past. Between the Hours is a stunningly beautiful book.
–Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest
Between the Hours by Barbara Siegel Carlson is an alluring collection of powerfully contemplative poems and prose poems that explore timeless interstices, imagining and inhabiting the spaces between moments, the pauses between present, past and future. Here the poet can see into the dark and brilliant heart of things, the paradoxical infinities found in windy nights, sleep, bones, a bog before dawn, remembered houses with undiscovered rooms, where a birthday is “a bookmark in a book without words” and the light of late winter is “deep in our bones, where we first sprouted / from the light.” Jack Gilbert, W.S. Merwin, Tu Fu, Heraclitus, the astronomer Olbers, Joan of Arc, Billie Holliday and Chekhov emerge like apparitions during these luminous excursions through the deep distance between our bodies and the objects and spaces that surround us….
–Stephan Delbos, Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA and author of Small Talk
Barbara Siegel Carlson 