About this Book

Poetry. In this book, poems compelled by the subjects of family history, parenthood, divorce, and the death of a brother become acts of witness and forgiveness. OUT OF REFUSAL to turn away from love and its inevitable loss, new ground is created: poems of lament become songs of creation.

OUT OF REFUSAL rises from the hardness of sorrow, from the glittering shards of grief, '... transforming / cold surfaces of what / is yet to be learned / into an offering....' These poems wrestle with profound absence and terrible loss, yet celebrate the hard-won knowledge '...that love is / out of all negatives / a shadow on the water of possibility / the soul of light and stones, what gives stones depth....' With moving trope and imagery, with resonant music, Carter gives us song that 'blooms from stone.'--Paulann Petersen

The poems of Carter McKenzie's OUT OF REFUSAL map the difficult territory of a family's prejudice, children growing and turning away, a brother's death.... [W]hat we learn in reading these unsettling and often radiant poems is that change can and does occur as poem after poem forms a witness born out of what she cannot ignore and refuses to forget in a necessary and moving journey toward acceptance.--Maxine Scates

Her voices are both ordinary and extraordinary. Their telling lights up experience, the way Orion lights 'in the dark before morning...transforming the cold / as I see it / into companions.'--Erik Muller

Grounded in the mysteries and solace of the natural world, replete with exquisite imagery and lyrical turns of phrase...these poems know '[I]t is never / over, cycles of sun and darkness.' Yet here is a poet who knows how 'to go out alone / on my own ship / every day, ' offering us ways to live that are both resilient and transformative.--Alison Townsend