BOOKS
Tributary (April 2021) ORDER HERE
Tributary tells “stories of loss and restitution”(–Publishers Weekly, starred review). Arranged as a church service, in tension with the ubiquitous, mythic river that floods their landscape, these fierce and urgent poems seek to expose the struggles and failings of family and faith, the rigidity of conditional love and loyalty. As they do, they mirror our national systemic crises of xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, fanatical religiosity, and racism. In Tributary, a woman rejects the laws of the “book of truth” that she is raised under in order to discover and claim her own morality.
“The poems in Carey Salerno’s astonishing Tributary move with the same tenacity and elegance as the river that symphonizes the collection. For everything the river comes to represent in these exquisite poems, it still doesn’t want to be human. The humanity comes from the poet’s deftness, her willingness to recognize the destructiveness of legacy and its transparent agendas while resisting, always resisting.”
More praise for Tributary:
“Tributary by Carey Salerno is a beautiful book of river, within river, against river as metaphor, as life force, as faith. Salerno skillfully oscillates within and without the river—refracting it, lifting it up to the light, and using it as a force to deconstruct family, societal, and racial failings. The speaker in these poems both denies and wants the river. In poem after poem, Salerno layers thought after thought onto the river until it overflows. A radiant dissent rises in the end. Dexterous, relentless, and edifying, these are exploding and gorgeous poems of unapologetic rebellion.” —Victoria Chang, author of OBIT
“In Tributary, Carey Salerno calls us into the urgent relevance of myth. The story of Babel becomes a family story, each member, in the aftermath of a family breakup, dispersing into a different idiom. Alert to how our ways of speaking whitewash over intention, thought, and feeling so we cannot see ourselves, or be seen by others, Salerno’s lyrics forge new linguistic pathways, gorgeously mixing diverse rhythms of time: rituals circle; the self seems to progress; the river dries up, then overflows in unpredictable cycles; myriad tangled stories branch out from the past. To enter this collection is to enter a new kind of communal gathering that asks us to hear real relation: of a river, for example, to a human voice.” —Mary Szybist, author of INCARNADINE
“Salerno delivers a bold, memorable, and capacious collection.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Carey Salerno’s Tributary concerns the prescriptive strictures and silencing imposed by the patriarchal extremism… Salerno embodies in the text the emotional and spiritual torque by which her narrator transforms frustration into forgiveness…” –Lisa Russ Sparr, Los Angeles Review of Books
“This idea of narrative truth came home for me while reading Carey Salerno’s Tributary, a collection of poems symphonized by an omniscient, mystic river…. . the speaker of Salerno’s poems, us[es] the metaphor of the river to deconstruct epigenetic systems of patriarchy, whiteness, and religion.” –Naheed Patel, Public Books
Lit from Inside (2013)
A compilation of archival materials accompanies this collection of forty years of Alice James Books poetry. Nearly 150 authors are represented in chronological order. Maxine Kumin states, "the list of authors is remarkable for its breadth, variety, and passion. The assortment is idiosyncratic, the range of voices and styles embraces the familiar personal narrative voice and the innovative." Contributors include Jane Kenyon, Fanny Howe, Forrest Gander, Jean Valentine, B.H. Fairchild, Matthea Harvey, Brian Turner, and Cole Swensen.
Buy at Amazon, Alice James Books, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite indie bookstore!
“Alice James Books has been one of the major forces in American poetry for the past four decades. . . . This is an essential book for readers who want to understand and enjoy contemporary American poetry.”
More praise for Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books:
“Alice James Books is one of the pure sources of American poetry. . . [the press] has started the careers of too many poets to name. This anthology is a birthday celebration in book form. . .” —NPR
“The history of American poetry is the history of the small press, and Alice James Books, true to its origins in the Seventies as a collective operation, is a large and very distinctive chapter in that history, well deserving of this anthology showcasing its poets and work, both experimental and traditional, that ranks among the most important of the past four decades. The next time a student poet asks me for an anthology that will teach her the art in its most exemplary and current state, this is the one I will hand her.” —B.H. Fairchild
“The founding members of Alice James Books welcomed me, in 1975, to a crew of feisty individuals committed to poetry. Unfettered by demands of market or profit, the press published—for forty years— tantalizing collections. Culture; family; feminism; friendship; history; passion; racism; war: it’s all in this anthology, a rewarding testimony to the independent spirit.” —Robin Becker
“The list of authors is remarkable for its breadth, variety, and passion. This is a big book: a reader needs fortitude to undertake its 207 pages, but anthologies are meant to be sipped, not gulped thirstily…I have downed the entire collection, 130-odd disparate celebratory, elegiac, lyrical, lofty, comic, surreal, imagist, formalist, postmodern bards. The assortment is idiosyncratic, the range of voices an styles embraces the familiar personal narrative voice and the innovative, often dissonant music of more experimental poems.” —Maxine Kumin
Shelter (2009)
Disturbing because of the cruelty intended as kindness to animals and the speaker’s unflinching, relentless insistence on her culpability, these poems force us to consider whether we can be redeemed by our capacity for love, compassion, and personal responsibility.Buy at Amazon, Alice James Books, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite indie bookstore!
“Unselfconsciously, nakedly, Salerno offers elucidation, internal and external, of the condition we comfortably call human.”
More praise for Shelter:
“…Salerno unfolds a story that we cannot stop reading—though…the bare truth on the page hurts… This first collection takes courage to read, but you can bet it took more courage to write, and we should be glad Salerno did it.” —Library Journal
“…this is real poetry, millennial poetry…[it] links our humanity to the way we treat animals we don’t want… Shelter is a hard book to read, but the lessons humans need aren’t always easy.” —The Bark Magazine
“In a volume as compassionate as it is unsettling, Carey Salerno questions the moral authority assumed in the narrow confines of the animal shelter. Abu Ghraib haunts these lines as the shelter takes on harrowing, allusive dimensions, and as the narrator weighs her burden of complicity. Shelter is filled with fierce and desperate yowling, much of it our own.” —Michael Waters