One Sleeve
by Richard Carr
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Richard Carr’s brilliant fifth book,
, collects all the resonating themes of his earlier work, turbocharges them, and demands that the reader, stripped of all pretense, illusion, and self-pity, face the human condition of our  time.    From  these  dark  poems  shine  great  beauty  and  a  strange, tentative-yet-tough  kindness,  while  simile  and  lyricism  transform  each poem  into a mythology  that is  both  frightening  and comforting.  –  Nancy White, author of
Sun, Moon, Salt and Detour
Carr’s narrator picks scabs off his philosophical wounds while his alter ego, ―One Sleeve,‖ attempts to make sense of a fractured universe.  ―Irony is the new  certainty,‖  declares  Carr’s  ambivalent  speaker,  caught  between  the physical sensations and philosophical problems of this world and the next.  – David Hulm, Kirkwood Community College, Iowa City
The very first poem announces that Carr will not be playing by the rules.  ―He thinks of himself in the third person / except sometimes when he talks. // I talk between people. / I aim for the space between passersby.‖  Breaking the rules  allows the narrator to  speak  with/as a  protean voice that makes him always multiple, inciting us—we passersby—into remaining, like One Sleeve, ―awake, counting beams of snowlight / hovering in the slats of the blinds.‖  – H. L. Hix, author of First Fire, Then Birds