Talking Leaves Scrapbook - poems by Vivian Mary Carroll
The debut collection from this highly anticipated poet, “a continuous flash of luminous poetry” (Cedar Sigo).
The debut collection from this highly anticipated poet, “a continuous flash of luminous poetry” (Cedar Sigo).
The debut collection from this highly anticipated poet, “a continuous flash of luminous poetry” (Cedar Sigo).
In this collection of poems, Vivian Mary Carroll crafts keen expressions of a life lived deeply. "These are the poems of a life-long traveler" (James Thomas Stevens) with "brisk lines of pull-no-punches wit, her own beguiling logic, and always a touch of heart coupled with resistance" (Sawnie Morris).
Vivian Mary Carroll (Cherokee Nation) spent many years in regional theater from Alaska to New York, including teaching costuming to students of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, Inc. Clown College. She worked for the Superior Court of Sacramento for twenty-three years and followed a British rock band and a country duo for many years, all the while writing and submitting for publication. She has studied at Idyllwild Arts Summer Writing Program, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and Writing By Writers Boulder Generative Workshop. She received her MFA at the age of seventy-two from the Institute of American Indian Arts.
This bookstore edition is run on 50# creme paper with a matte laminate paperback cover, printed and bound in the United States.
Praise for Talking Leaves Scrapbook:
“She uses her senses to extract the essence of her experiences and transforms them into images and metaphors that belong to her, that are unique, that suffice to recognize her being in the universe, alive, meaningful and filled with emotion. Her poems resonate with a deep belonging, they roam sniffing out the meaning of things, discovering the lived past still persist in everything her sensibilities languish in, plucking with words the spines of light that exist in memory and making them sparkle before her mind … and ours.”
- Jimmy Santiago Baca
“Talking Leaves Scrapbook delivers on its title by way of a ‘memory map’ of images, which Carroll’s peripatetic speaker travels through personal as well as collective history, unfurling story from the ground up.... Hers is a restless music, peppered by recollections of the burn- shocks of racism withstood and a grappling with the broken-treaty past, revealed and countered in brisk lines of pull-no-punches wit, her own beguiling logic, and always a touch of heart coupled with resistance.”
- Sawnie Morris, author of Her, Infinite, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize
“These are the poems of a life-long traveler.... But a traveler who often strays from the map and admits repeatedly to ending up lost again. By collection’s end, we realize that Carroll has grasped the carousel’s ring, securing her firm footing in this whirling world and leaving us thankful for the Talking Leaves Scrapbook.”
- James Thomas Stevens, author of The Golden Book
“Unlike a real scrapbook, preserving the past, Vivian Mary Carroll’s Talking Leaves Scrapbook reimagines and reinvigorates us into a vibrant present, where the past is still living and the future was already here.”
- Ed Skoog, author of Run The Red Lights
“Talking Leaves Scrapbook is a continuous flash of luminous poetry. There is a contagious joy and appreciation present in this book that I find reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg and Sherwin Bitsui. The agency of the poet is rather astounding.”
- Cedar Sigo, author of All This Time
