All Born Perfect
Kelsay Books, 2019
$16, including shipping
My latest book, All Born Perfect, can be purchased via my publisher or Amazon. For a signed copy, order via my website.
The riveting poems of Carla Drysdale’s All Born Perfect distinguish themselves with candor and craft. Combining the inspired voice of a word-musician and the matter-of-fact tone of a survivor, Drysdale’s poems depict a working mother bringing up two sons. Bold, yet understated, the poems reveal that the mother’s acts of love and labor provoke her own childhood trauma of sexual abuse. Drysdale never shrinks from the complex presentation of these issues in her tender and shocking stanzas of parenting and office life, childhood and climate change. The marvel of this collection, abounding with unexpected metaphors and driven rhythms, is the deep understanding of time reached by the epiphany of the title poem: “All Born Perfect.”
— Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst
Inheritance
Finishing Line Press, 2015
$14, including shipping
My chapbook of poems, Inheritance, can be purchased via my publisher. For a signed copy, order via my website.
"The majestic, determined poems in Carla Drysdale’s stunning debut chapbook Inheritance act as a dual lens to art and motherhood. They reflect the thriving childhood of the poet’s sons and also refract their mother’s childhood, demonstrating that what is inherited can both be passed on and reversed. In Drysdale’s poems, the fruit of tenderness is always set inside a rind of candor. She practices a poetics of strength: not only does vigorous language define her poems, but their sheer force of character gives them backbone. Inheritance shines with Drysdale’s craft and passionate intensity."
—Molly Peacock, author of Cornucopia and The Second Blush
Little Venus
Tightrope Books, 2009
$15, including shipping
Signed copies of my full-length book of poems, Little Venus, can be purchased via my website. Limited copies remain on Amazon.com.
"Carla Drysdale writes relentlessly truth-telling poetry, but if it were just a matter of honesty — even about experiences it is terrible to be honest about — we would not be unnerved in the way we are about her work. What makes her book difficult to put down is the rhetorical intelligence everywhere evident, the rigorous musicality in the face of the violence of the world, the spotless eloquence. These poems are bitter, beautiful, compensatory."
—Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer-prize winning author of 3 Sections
