Preverbal - Paperback

by Carroll Beauvais (Author)

How does trauma shape us? What is memory but a flawed attempt to set the record straight so we can live with it? How do we give voice to what is mostly whispered in the dark? How do we go on?

These are the questions, and Carroll Beauvais has the answers.

The poems in Preverbal, Carroll Beauvais' debut collection, are wrought from the spit and shine of life's hardest moments. In them, the dead are as present as the living, their power increased by their absence, as they occupy the liminal space between memory and imagination, just out of reach and impossibly distant. Beauvais knows that what lies in that unreachable place beneath language needs precise words to coax it out and manifest it as something that sustains us. Her voice, taut, lyrical, and unblinking, manages this arduous and delicate task with grit and grace. Hers is a debut that demands our attention and fulfills the highest level of poetry's ambition: connection to what makes us human.

- Chris Kennedy, author of The Strange God Who Made Us

Carroll Beauvais' Preverbal is a searing book about love, family, and grief, its setting not the world we imagine but the one we actually live in: with its 'puddles of catheter urine [and] pools of blood, ' its Spanish moss like a lost mother's hair in the trees. These are fearless, unflinching poems from a writer who knows how to summon her ghosts and make them sing.

- Patrick Phillips, author of Song of the Closing Doors and Elegy for a Broken Machine