The Life

An acclaimed poet deepens her exploration of the domestic in a new collection of playful and wise poems

The poems in Carrie Fountain’s third collection, The Life, exist somewhere, as Rilke says, between our daily life and the great work –an interstitial space where sidelong glances live alongside shouts to heaven. In elegant, colloquial language, Fountain observes her children dressing themselves in fledgling layers of personhood, creating their own private worlds and personalities, and makes room for genuine marvels in the midst of routine. Attuned to the delicate, fleeting moments that together comprise a life, these poems offer a guide by which to navigate the signs and symbols, and to pilot if not the perfect life, the only life, the life we are given.