On Subjects of Which We Know Nothing

What are these? Birds passing over at midnight? Light speeding sideways? Or call them poems and their marvelous footnotes, just for now: in On Subjects of Which We Know Nothing, Karen Carcia has made a heartbreakingly beautiful thing of them, these poems, these stars or birds begun as poems and then–having traveled by footnote!–ending either fathoms deep inside themselves or far out into deep space, I can’t tell which, just somewhere dark and quiet enough to truly perceive the mechanics of moonlight or the silences of a map. I could travel these distances with Carcia over and over: how lovingly she remembers anything a mere numeral might have effaced. –Nancy Eimers Karen Carcia is among the few voices in poetry genuinely receptive enough to track the crisscrossings of perceptions, and this collection is the most curious I have read in a long while. Curious: all the way back to cure, care. These poems tender a caring place for truth, as if, in truth, the beautiful could not be more close at hand. And, then, the footnotes: stars that shine from under our feet, sourcing our daily longing for connection to the quiddities, essences that are themselves perceptions and voicings–of anything we might ever hope to ask of required reading. –William Olsen