Anna Silver

Habitation of Wonder

Arts & Literature

“‘In this life,’ Abigail Carroll writes, ‘we could use a little more/beauty.’ Fortunately, Carroll has gifted us that beauty with this spectacular volume of poetry. In poems whose sounds audaciously zip and leap about the page, Carroll finds her creed in both nature—mountains, weeds, elephants, the ‘liturgies/of the waves’—and in language itself, locating in the letter m and in commas proof of God’s handiwork and the world’s sanctity. These swirling poems exemplify the lyric as song, and in poetry’s ability to restore the reader’s wonder in ‘the imminence/of winter, the free enterprise of grace.’”