Underscore. Julie Carr. Omnidawn Publishing, 2024. 112 pages.

I will find the rotting thing. I was looking at a broad leaf as I said this and then it started
to rain 
is raining like never before, 
the stench and its origins untraceable. 

So writes Julie Carr in “Night,” a poem in the latter half of Underscore. “Night” twists and turns between the natural world and the technological one, and the relationship between these two appears to emphasize Carr’s personal relationships. As with nature itself, these relationships are like an ouroboros, one begetting the other with no clear beginning. In fact, much of Underscore feels untraceable. Like a swell of music, Underscore vibrates all around the reader as one works through this recently published book of lyric poetry. This is Carr’s thirteenth full-length publication, and it is dedicated to two late mentors, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, reflecting the two different facets of Carr’s creative practice. 

This dance-like sensibility present throughout Underscore is no mistake. Carr writes in “A Note on Title and Dedication,” 

Nancy Stark Smith’s ‘The Underscore’ is an improvisational dance practice, performed by people all over the world…It begins with the body moving with the air and the earth, with the pulse and the warmth of blood running through veins. Nancy was my teacher for about ten years, starting in 1987 when I met her at a dance workshop outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Carr’s writing practice appears, then, to be an extension of her dance practice, such that she creates an emotional atmosphere through language. In contrast to the goal of making or exploring meaning, which the written word often does, each work touches, melds, blends into the next, though they never seem directly related to one another. In the same way that bodies dance, Carr’s body of text is contained within itself, allowing each free-flowing verse to interface with the other. The content—the meaning—only appears to serve the form and the atmosphere, similar to contemporary and improvisational dance. 

In many ways, Carr has made the words dance. They shimmer on the page; verses engage, touch, and fold around each other. In one moment, the reader is embedded within the natural world, such as in her poem “Reckless Use (a rough-cut cento with Eigner, Bartlett, Torres, and Conrad)”: 

I walk, I walk
the flowers seem to nod 
I walk my one good wing warily flutters, the flowers seem to
nod. 

One page later, a contemporary narrative hybrid-tale about friends and lovers, New England, grief and violence. The sudden switch to prose-poetry would be jarring if Carr’s talent for gently pushing the reader into various consciousnesses and subject matters, like a boat into calm water, weren’t so apparent. 

Underscore is aptly titled, not just for its eponymous reference to the dance practice, but because it gently pulls at the root of every word written, emphasizing, turning over, silently emboldening—carefully. Ever so gently. An underscore in language does the same—emphasize a word or phrase without drawing attention to itself. Literally beneath the word, an underscore takes up no room, serves as an echo, changes the onus of the language. 

Carr’s work is more about atmosphere and syntax than narrative or meaning. She appears disinterested in communicating via traditional forms—in Underscore, the poem’s purpose is not necessarily to interface with meaning but to build up emotional atmosphere. Carr, however, is at her strongest when she allows the readers to glimpse the narrator’s interiority. Throughout the book, slivers of memory, recounting, slip in and out of the pages. Her prose poem It allows contemporaneity—the 1990s, pulling over for gas, a Chinese restaurant—to mingle briefly with stream-of-consciousness and lyric—“The day was decidedly unmagical…Felt a little Jesus. Felt a little egg.” Combined, the reader is pleasantly caught off-guard as any narrative structure that Carr introduces through memory or colloquialism is thrillingly complicated by her lyric voice. 

In so many ways, this method successfully mimics contemporary dance. While classical dance contains a predictable narrative structure, following combinations and conveying traditional meanings, contemporary dance uses these same frameworks to create new ways for the body to move through space. Underscore references the body frequently—bodies make their presence known in a variety of unexpected ways. Thighs, elbows, mouths, ears. In “Dirty water: Montrose, Colorado,” Carr writes,

Once without sleep or enough of it I spread my unreliable thigh 
for one green-tailed towhee to hop on briefly she with her three toes staked 
an indelible claim of invitation on the human 
skin So many shuttered shops
for clothes and toys, frames and flowers, books, tools, measuring cups, nothing 

…

I swam that day without moving my limbs to serve 
my bare foot to the floor of this soft delirious valley made green by a war made by men 
who knew nothing at all of all that would come to fail to be. 

Here, the dance of the words has a basic structure—Carr muses on the beauty of the natural world and the way history works more like a spiral, curling on top of itself, than a straight line—but the poem undercuts itself at many points. The capital ‘S’ in “So many shuttered shops / for clothes and toys…,” is a delicious syntactic surprise in the midst of evocative, atmospheric lyric. It’s as if a certain dance combination suddenly switched, turning from rounded movements to more angular ones. 

There are times, however, where the dance gets lost in itself. Carr is clearly more at ease with work that utilizes line breaks than the poems that attempt prose or narrative. In “Oh, I,” the narrator works a halting account across the page of their relationship with different friends, mentioning several unexplained names, dropping the reader into disparate locations—Boston, Mexico, gardens in Europe. While the start-stop of imagery works well with the line breaks that structure Carr’s poetry, the same strategy confuses her narrative prose and pulls the reader out of the book. 

If the goal of Underscore is to submerge the reader in a loose sort of tete-a-tete with the luscious imagery that Carr has brought to all 116 pages of this book, she has succeeded. While there are certain themes that crop up again and again—grief, death, coming of age, sickness, motherhood—the book seems best appreciated if the reader simply allows the rhythm of the words to wash over them, like music. Through these lyrics, the author conjures up an emotional interiority around the reader as if a set of walls. 

This emphasis on emotional resonance allows the body—of text, of dance practice—to open. Unrestrained by traditional forms, by a beginning or middle or end, Underscore allows itself instead to lift up the rhythm and syntax of each word, observing it unrestrainedly, before setting it back down to dance with the others. Carr writes, 

For Jean [Valentine], what mattered in a poem was its emotional or spiritual center. The rest, she was less interested in. While she might admire flamboyant displays of language, might enjoy formal experimentation or narrative line, none of this was essential to her. Poetry was a way into the interior, and that interior…was unknowable and ineffable by definition.

While Carr’s work achieves this sentiment almost exactly by trying to get at the “emotional…center” of each word and rhythm, I would not say the interiority of this work is “unknowable and ineffable by definition.” In particular, Carr’s references to motherhood and the natural world betray her interests, her deep sense of care to the world around her, and a kind of nurturing. This nurturing is ultimately an essential structure throughout Underscore. I do not mean nurture as it relates to the content of the writing itself—to motherhood, to nature, to sickness and health—but rather a nurturing of language.  

Carr’s respect for language, and desire to nurse each word as it appears on the page, is evident. As with much dance practice, Carr takes great pains to make the poetry appear effortless, fluid, almost accidental in its lyrical associations. This nurturing goes beyond the meaning of a word and turns to form, to atmosphere, to rhythm. These are Carr’s great strengths and successes with Underscore. There, the interiority of her work is found, and known.