Synopses & Reviews
Materialist, feminist, queer, hybrid--channeling the sensibilities of Gloria Anzaldúa, Rosario Castellanos, Mary Kelly, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cecilia Vicuña, Patssi Valdez, Bernadette Mayer--Carroll's second collection of prose poems and word-images contemplates the cost of living in an era of "cruel optimism." Procedurally formalizing self-editing and indecision, Carroll undocuments the quotidian's shades of gray/grey, the contingencies of post-Fordist relationality in the pre-Occupy window of time between September 11, 2001, and the 2008 recession. "Cognative dissonance" meets "the rite to be a citizen." "What is the difference between neoliberalism and globalization?" tempers the counter-cultural question--"And, me?--" In Fannie + Freddie/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography, Carroll muses, "Like Sammy and Rosie, Fannie and Freddie got laid."
Off-grid, she mixes metaphors, criss-crossing the borders erected between the lyric and the conceptual "I." She crosses out the dividing lines elected to maintain performance art, visual culture, and poetry as discrete clairvoyant mediums of social engagement. She layers jokes, puns, riddles, platitudes, hackneyed phrases, adages, boilerplate, buzzwords, mottos, proverbs, rubber-stamp rhetoric, slogans, threadbare phrases, trite remarks, and truisms over each other to provide a portrait of the contemporary American landscape as experienced by working- and middle-class Americans. Carroll offers an elaborate palimpsest of text and images--text that is often shaded, crossed out, or printed over other text or images.
Claudia Rankine, who chose the volume for Fordham University's 2011-2012 Poets Out Loud Prize, succinctly sings its praises: "The intelligence, compassion and dimensionality of this collection place it in a category all its own--it belongs and is crafted out of the psychic anxieties of the twenty-first century. I, for one, was both exhilarated and humbled by Fannie + Freddie/ The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography."
Review
What is Amy Sara Carroll's Fannie + Freddie: The Sentimentality of Post-9-11 Pornography? It's 'a dissident text' of 'home-grown, elemental earthiness' in which the domestic sphere responds to urgent global warnings. It's a labor-intensive work of pregnant pauses in the passionate life of the artist occupying a female body. It's una prosa poética of double-crossing borders dividing self and other, a legally admissible document of creative and critical testimonio. It's a self-revealing artist's book in which the vindictive family romance bubbles to the surface as a palimpsest of identity inscriptions. It's a heartbreaking work of harrowing ingenuity.-Harryette Mullen, University of California, Los Angeles
Amy Sara Carroll offers here an infrared snapshot of affective anachronism that lives the before-and-after of love and war in a poetic of the present flooded by history, memory, sensation, and relation. Wielding female complaint, maternal sentimentality, activist polemic, and auto-ethnographic documentation, its palimpsest feels out for form and refuses whatever is easy in its offerings. How can we live the unbearable in attachment to life amidst the force of the details that give and disturb its shape? The noisy beauty of the image that Carroll provides is powerful and sensational in the best of all senses.-Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago
The prescient prose poems of Amy Sara Carroll's Fannie + Freedie: The Sentimentality of Post-9-11 Pornography--made ever more tangible by erasures, overwrites, strike-throughs, gray scaling, and photo-text simulacra--re-conceptualize the current economic crisis through (and upon) the individual human body that struggles to survive this global 'free' market collapse. Carroll's texts are, indeed, brave strophes for a catastrophic era.-Mark Nowak, Manhattanville College
A restrained genius: the kind that flares.-Bhanu Kapil, Naropa University
"This book is infused with both maternal love and juxtapositions of the relational closeness of intimacy, sexualities, and parenting with the inequalities and exploitation in the social, political, and ecological landscapes that frame the privacy of family." -Mom Egg Review
"You need to see it for yourself." -Poetry Foundation
About the Author
Amy Sara Carroll is Assistant Professor of American Culture, Latina/o Studies, and English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the author of SECESSION (Hyperbole Books, 2012). Carroll's poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies such as HOW2, Version, Rattle, Jubilat, Talisman, Vandal, Carolina Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Mandorla, Chain, Bombay Gin, Seneca Review, Borderlands, and Faultline.