And below is always the accumulated past, which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains.
--From Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson​
Carol Denson is a writer based in Houston. She studied the craft of poetry at Rice University with Susan Wood and at University of Houston's Creative Writing Program with Adam Zagajewski, Cynthia MacDonald, Garrett Hongo, and Edward Hirsch. She has a chapbook of poetry called Across the Antique Surface, and has published poems, essays, and stories in various journals including Adirondack Review, disclosure, Gulf Coast, J Journal, Literary Mama, Minerva Rising, and Rattle.
Publications
Essay
Transfertle the Plum
A few days ago, Ethan, who calls poems plums, walked over to me with a baseball picture book written in Spanish and asked, “Mom, will you transfertle this into English for me?”
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Poem
Cutting Back the Fig
Wrath-singed, my father's teeth set to say what he would say with brash, crackling faith
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if he could just remember it
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Story
I Don't Have Time for This
“Jen, will you spray my mouth?”
“Coming.” Jen stopped scrubbing a pot, dried her hands, and walked into the bedroom.
“I need my melanoma,” Margo said.
“Melatonin, Mom.
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Chapbook
Across the Antique Surface
The poems in Carol Denson's Across the Antique Surface live in the tension between connectedness and separateness, struggling to arrive at a world that "isn't order or chaos, but splendor, / broken, ordinary, rare." These are beautiful poems, alive to the things of this world, both natural and man made-mushrooms and scissors, Nandina berries and dominos--poems wise enough "to say this motion of despair is play."
--Susan Wood, author of the Book of Ten
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