Lucifer

Lucifer

<b>Richard Carr's Lucifer is the devil everybody knows.</b> Mick the Bastard and Juliet are frighteningly familiar, too. Lyric reflections on wild, willful abandon, Carr's latest sequence limns a dark, doomed life with only a hint of the silver believers pray lines blue-black storm clouds when they loom overhead.<br>— Brian Beatty, author of <i>Duck!</i> and host of <i>You Are Hear</i><br><br> <b>Lucifer is not a dark companion. He is <i>the</i> dark companion,</b> a useless blanket keeping you only more wet in the rain—yet you won't take it off. It's a cloak, after all, an illusion of protection that sometimes we need, if only because it's so familiar. With Richard Carr's <i>Lucifer</i>, we peel the blanket off and see it for what it is—in Carr's case, brilliance. Dark, dangerously beautiful, savage in its salvation.<br>— Paula J. Lambert, author of <i>The Sudden Seduction of Gravity</i> and <i>The Guilt That Gathers</i><br><br> <b>In <i>Lucifer</i>, Richard Carr achieves</b> what both any good fiction writer and any good poet strive to. He draws us into a sharply defined world and makes us care about its inhabitants, doing so through language that is true to that world yet transcendent: "Juliet's shirt buttons are fragile, holy wafers. / I take one in my mouth, press it with my tongue tip, / pull the shirt taut like a white kite, / and let it go." <i>Lucifer</i> challenges us to love the unlovable and commit the unthinkable, all while it sings in our ears.<br>— Darci Schummer, prize winning poet and fiction writer