Chapbook Review: Julie Carpenter

​She Needs That Edge 

Written by Paul Brookes 

Review by Julie Carpenter 

---

Sacred Chickens has, published Paul Brooke’s poetry and reviewed his chapbooks and before, and he’s one of our favorites.  His verse is distilled into singular moments that are paradoxically extraordinarily narrative.  This chapbook is no exception.  It reaches the apex of this juxtaposition, containing whole life stories in the shape of a hand, or a sticky note on the refrigerator.  Every poem is a tiny aperture into a widening depth of experience.

Brookes has a startling ability to observe simple moments and objects and make them transparent to the reader, even as they remain opaque to the subjects of his poetry. The poems flow naturally from one perspective to the next, illuminating the dark beauty in the despair and repetitive thoughts of his all too human characters.
​
The poems are unpretentious, examining the ordinary, and yet they haunt the imagination, leave room for whole new stories, illuminate unexplored corners.  A line that almost seems incidental, can add whole depths of imagined history to a character.
 
From She Is Seen As Unseen
“Raquel is bemused by her dreams.
In them she’s always a man
who is killed by a woman named Raquel.”

This depth holds up to repeated readings, it expands in the mind each time.  For this reason, this book is well worth your time and money.

Julie Carpenter is the creator of the Sacred Chickens website.  She is   dedicated to telling stories and making sure that indie writers and publishers have a way to be heard.  She uses narrative, her own and others’, to help interpret the world. She has a Master of Professional Writing from the University of Memphis, with an emphasis in Composition Theory. She wants to bend reality one story at a time.  Julie’s work has appeared in Fiction on the Web and will be included The New Guard. She is currently working on a novel.

---