Dead Hand - Carson Jordan
Dead Hand - Carson Jordan
Note: This is a pre-order. Books ship in September.
International Orders available via Asterism Distribution.
Standard Edition: $18
Limited Edition: $30 (sold out)
26 copies signed/lettered by the author. Includes limited edition 11×14 ‘Every hungry dog sainted’ poster.
DEAD HAND is a book of debts and genuflections. Jordan's poems move between the sacred and the profane, building a fervent theology from lucky license plates and wax phones, French tips and jet black eyeliner, deli meat and dead-hand devotions. Across ruined gardens and rest stops, Persian pools and funeral grounds, the narrator moves through a vast landscape with an unceasing hunger that has no earthly cure. Good time girl and grief embodied, she headlines her own apology tour then quietly holds vigil. Jordan’s constant offerance to the other: a hand outstretched and a philosophy of welcoming with no sudden movements. The world of these poems is one where everything is consecrated, nothing is redeemed, and grace lives where it should, somewhere closer to the ground.
Art by Sam Orozco.
Movement of desire traced along the bold and deceptively offhand lines of a careful cartographer’s first mapping of her world. Carson Jordan’s debut collection is no small event: here is a voice in its most declarative entrance to a crowded room. Here is a voice interested in the beauty of an Americana sprawl and “fire-breathed women with smokey blowouts.” No poem squanders a line or choice of word. Each opportunity to fineness the contours of contemporary language is taken—each poem arranges like a collection of rest stop trinkets on an antique dresser in certain light. And light comes from the television as much as it does sundown in scattered thunder; a voice fills the room: “I’ll hang out in the wound of things before they / heal pray for rain”. Jordan is a poet of blunt and lush curation; a poet of intuition and tone. Reading these poems, I am the scallop shucked eyeless on the plate, and when she says: “I tell / my secrets to you” I listen with bated breath. —Bianca Stone
In DEAD HAND, Jordan reminds us "there is hope in the details / proof to the fervid presence of god." And so she pours through every detail of life, finding the sacred in television, the profane in doing good to those who hate you. It is a beautiful rapture to be held by these poems as they curse you with the ability to be moved by nothing and everything. —Giulia Bencivenga
DEAD HAND is a talisman. —Sophie Appel
At the crux between one life and another, Carson Jordan keeps a mountaintop hermitage in charmingly anti-ascetic disarray, seeking absolution in a hoard of cultural siftings, personal failings and clear-eyed resolutions. In a world that feels like a neverending funeral, DEAD HAND is a quiet joke in the eulogy, a soft hand on the shoulder and a sunset to disappear into. An essential collection from a future hall-of-famer. —Mark Wadley, founding editor of BRUISER
In DEAD HAND, Carson Jordan bundles sin, loosens the stone in the middle, and looks inside the lamp. Distance becomes wanting and wanting gives way to the company of a black fly and an apparition. She knows ‘God is always petting you without permission’. And her poems pet back. So join her on the mountain. —Casper Lee