Here Versus Elsewhere

“Allison Carter’s narratives are virtuostic in craft and scope. Her quiet, simple lines betray a pressure and seem to boil at times. There is universal truth: ‘And then the zeitgeist we/became strictly inseparable/or so I thought.’ There is also great humor and precision, ‘But babies come from many places/and they are easy to grab at/through the rattling branches.’ Her poetry is an all-around pleasure to read, and it stays with me, like a consoling friend.” —Noelle Kocot

“Human echolocation is an ability of humans to detect objects in their environment by sensing echoes from those objects. Deploying complex language—polyrhythmic, repetitive, reverberant, resounding—with an eerie proficiency, Allison Carter’s writing performs a kind of linguistic human echolocation that articulates, navigates, and wayfinds space—physical, relational, emotional, and otherwise…—all within a network of deceptively familiar frames. In her new book, Here Versus Elsewhere, it is the accumulation of emptinesses, expertly and intentionally drawn, that definitively interprets the boundaries of the spaces the reader occupies as well as the nature of the entities, human and otherwise, that serve as persistent companions within those selfsame spaces.” —Harold Abramowitz