Product Description

The Elephant House delves into the tension between remembering and forgetting, exploring the pain and rewards of growing up the daughter of a troubled poet who was always on the move. Claudia Carlson evokes vanished worlds and charged spaces, the rooms and landscapes in which our individual and family dramas play out. She journeys from Mexico to Brooklyn, shaping memory with photography, art, and myth. With lively wit and imagery, the house of this book embraces the themes of family and the never-ending search for place.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2024362 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-31
• Released on: 2007-03-31
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

Review
A moving sequence about the life of Carlson's mother, who was also a poet, haunts the volume...an impressive debut. --Jeffry Harrison

Open this wonderful new book and prepare to fall under the spell of these delightful, inventive poems. --Nicole Cooley

Carlson's poems combine wit and form with a painter s eye for detail...you won t want to miss a thing. --Meg Kearney

About the Author
Claudia Carlson was born in Bloomington, Indiana. She graduated from Stony Brook University. She has worked as a book designer, cartographer, calligrapher, quilt designer, illustrator, and website designer. She co-founded the writing group River Writers of Manhattan; it had a 15th anniversary reading at the Mercantile Library in 2006. Carlson studied poetry at the Frost Place and the 92nd St. Y. She is the co-editor of the anthology The Poet s Grimm: Twentieth Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. Her poems have appeared in journals including Court Green, Southern Poetry Review, and Heliotrope. Divide, The Cream City Review, and Gargoyle have published her photographs. With Jack Hirschman (poet laureate of San Francisco), she is editing a collection of her mother's poems, Postscripts: Collected Poems of Helen Z. Carlson, 1948-1975. On Sundays, she paints watercolors (see her work at www. claudiagraphics.com). She is a senior book designer at Oxford University Press and lives in New York City with her family.

Customer Reviews

An Impressive Debut
In her first book of poetry, Claudia Carlson delights, entertains, and impresses. Whether dealing with the ordinary terrors of childhood, as in the "Leaving Your Toys to the Dogs," the adult's attempts to come to terms with parents, as in "Sighting Academics in the Quad" and "Hell-in-the-Box," or the dissolution of a marriage, as in "Tornado Warnings" and "Ode on a Duck Head Umbrella," Carlson brings a fresh eye and a unique wit that inspire the reader to experience these universal topics in a new way. Carlson's imagined versions of historical and literary figures, such as "Picasso's Model" and "Bluebeard's Pre-nup," are also a pleasure to read.

Elephant House Enchants
Claudia Carlson's first collection enchants with wit and bright imagery. Never academic but always informed, the poems lead us down a winding path through a peripatetic childhood into the life of a grownup artist. From The Bees, which describes a small child's frightening first introduction to racism, to Picasso's Model, 1909, which invokes the model's sensuous relationship to the painter, we see the poet-in-progress. Pornos, the Goddess of Hack, is a hilarious evocation of the writer's frustration and temptations; and Bluebeard's Pre-nup is a very funny warning to anyone entering a relationship with deliberately closed eyes. This collection ranges wide, and touches on the whole gamut of human emotion; but I cherish it most for the laughter of recognition when I recognize the human frailties and failings it describes so well.

Welcome to the Elephant House
Claudia Carlson's first book of poems is an excellent collection woven together with consistent themes. Though grounded in certain locales such as her childhood home's attic and the Bronx Zoo, her pieces transport you back to similar places in your own past. Carlson is Anne Sexton with a sense of humor. Funny, poignant, and sad moments are all illustrated by clever metaphors that colorfully describe her experiences and make you rethink your own.