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Winner of the 2002 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry
"Page after page, the recognizably-real and the imaginative flirt with and complement one another, while the tonalities we hear and feel seem to be informed by a rare blend of play and lament. Comer's rhythms authenticate what she asserts. Even when moments in her poems elude me, the authority of her voice keeps me in and with their drift. Or, as in some of the longer poems, images and claims, some of them strange, accumulate associatively and impressionistically. They leave us with a true account of the activity of a mind." —Stephen Dunn
In The Unrequited Carrie St. George Comer takes up and invigorates the line of American poetry that might be called the "lyric surreal." Everywhere one looks in Comer's poems the eye finds startling evocations of mystery: "each word a monastery in the wind"; "a hand falling open from a deep sleep"; "Summer: a body rebuilt." The late poet James Wright was master of this mode—this variant of the American sublime—and Comer sometimes partakes of what one critic called Wright's "beautiful doom." But Comer's poems are her own: more straightforwardly surreal than Wright's, more open to our existential comedy. In her work we find a peculiarly American combination of humor and wild invention; a generosity of spirit that sides with hope, even as it admits to earthly sadness.
Carrie St. George Comer received her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets prize. Her poems have appeared in APR, Fence, The Sonora Review, New Orleans Review, Conjunctions, and she was the recipient of the 2001 Black Warrior Review Prize in Poetry. She has taught at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and currently lives in Miami, Florida
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