What Happens Next is Anyone's Guess has landed and is available from Beyond Baroque Books, and from your favorite book source.
"Here is a collection that reveals what happens when skill meets substantial talent. And what, precisely, is it that happens? The unpredictable—from poem to poem, line to line, a cascade of surprises. Mischief, memory, dream and lusty desire come into play here, and one recurring feature: in virtuoso displays of heady language, the blood and bone of the animal and natural world."
"The poems in Carol Potter’s latest collection, What Happens Is Anyone’s Guess, are strange, funny, and unwittingly soulful. Her poems operate on the logic of dreams and innuendos. Potter’s uncanny narratives also reveal her fluency in the surrealist tradition of pairing calamity with the transformative power of fun. This book resonates with the pure delight that only poetry can summon."---Eugene Gloria
John Rabb Emison Professor of Creative and Performing Arts and Professor of English DePauw University
Ellen Miller-Mack's Mom Egg Review of What Happens Next is Anyone's Guess:
https://momeggreview.com/2022/07/02/what-happens-next-is-anyones-guess-by-carol-potter/
Some Slow Bees 2014 Winner of the FIELD Poetry Prize from Oberlin College Press
Carol Potter's four previous books have earned many admirers and multiple awards. But the scope and depth of Some Slow Bees, winner of the 2014 FIELD Poetry Prize, will be a revelation even to her most devoted fans.
Potter's new collection is a book about trouble, about loss: relationships, farms, parents, places. But there's also humor, a wry look at the way we invite or stumble into trouble and how we embrace the adventure. From children at their desks watching the flood leak into the schoolroom, to the narrator and her lover paddling down a river in the dark, the book charts a journey from loss to repair. It ends with a sonnet sequence, "The Miss Nancy Papers," that leads us from the psychological terrain of the 1950s into the present, where "if anyone knew what war we were coming home from / we would come home from it." This is a book about how to get lost, and how to get home.
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Short History of Pets, Cleveland State University Press Poetry Award, 1999
Winner of the 1999 CSU Poetry Center Prize, and the 2001 Balcones Award for Poetry
“Short History of Pets is a knock-out punch from the get-go. With captivating power, it reminds us that what claims or appears to be short may also be profound, deep and enduring. Also, how many histories are hidden, and for how many difficult reasons. Carol Potter writes with a magnetically potent instinct for pacing and a stunning originality of style. Her poems pull us into scenes, images, ragged relationships, complicated worlds of adults— you’ll come out voting for children and animals, as well as re-examining every troubled saga you encounter with a more vivid eye and sense of smell. READ THIS BOOK: It’ s as important and indelible as that.” –Naomi Shihab Nye
Upside Down in the Dark, Alice James Books, April 1995
University of Maine, Farmington
“These poems by Carol Potter, about being a woman, a mother, a lesbian, are remarkably pure and full of energy. Written with love, they seem to imply that, yes, there is pain, but what a miracle there is for its setting. These poems are a rare meeting of craft and spontaneity, as if the poet were standing by the flume of a spillway and shaping the flow with her hands.”
—Doug Anderson
“The sense of dislocation—of homelessness—that is at the heart of this collection functions, paradoxically, as the source of intimate observation and recognition of the dramas of ‘home’ everywhere. Kaleidoscopically, scenes and people, present and past, near and far, settle into patterns of ‘memory crystal,’ brightly colored and particular, yet with few epiphanies or tidy resolutions, suggesting that, with a turn of the wrist, another equally absorbing arrangement might be achieved. Potter…seeks no high ground, no safety or rainbow’s end, but allows the self to be likewise given and withdrawn, with poignancy and without fear. That desire pales in these poems before the irresistible ‘what is,’ in all its variety and instability, is what intrigues me most about Upside Down in the Dark.”
—Linda McCarriston
University of Maine, Farmington
“These poems by Carol Potter, about being a woman, a mother, a lesbian, are remarkably pure and full of energy. Written with love, they seem to imply that, yes, there is pain, but what a miracle there is for its setting. These poems are a rare meeting of craft and spontaneity, as if the poet were standing by the flume of a spillway and shaping the flow with her hands.”
—Doug Anderson
“The sense of dislocation—of homelessness—that is at the heart of this collection functions, paradoxically, as the source of intimate observation and recognition of the dramas of ‘home’ everywhere. Kaleidoscopically, scenes and people, present and past, near and far, settle into patterns of ‘memory crystal,’ brightly colored and particular, yet with few epiphanies or tidy resolutions, suggesting that, with a turn of the wrist, another equally absorbing arrangement might be achieved. Potter…seeks no high ground, no safety or rainbow’s end, but allows the self to be likewise given and withdrawn, with poignancy and without fear. That desire pales in these poems before the irresistible ‘what is,’ in all its variety and instability, is what intrigues me most about Upside Down in the Dark.”
—Linda McCarriston
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Before We Were Born, Alice James Books, April 1990
University of Maine, Farmington
Potter’s unflinching recollection of a harsh rural childhood full of siblings, cows, chickens, and wonderment makes for arresting poems.”
—Maxine Kumin
“Whether she tells of a lover’s body, childhood on a farm, a separation, or a trip to dentist, Carol Potter’s concern is human mystery. Giving equal weight to inner and outer landscapes, she evokes a woman’s memories, dreams, and sensual experience. The poems in this original first collection intimate, lyrical, quizzical, surreal. My favorite among them have the vulnerability and eroticism of skin.”
—Joan Larkin
“I admire the power of Carol Potter’s dry, dreamy, country voice, its joyful sexuality, its insights, its understated humor. This is an odd and shrewd and most valuable book.”
—Jean Valentine
University of Maine, Farmington
Potter’s unflinching recollection of a harsh rural childhood full of siblings, cows, chickens, and wonderment makes for arresting poems.”
—Maxine Kumin
“Whether she tells of a lover’s body, childhood on a farm, a separation, or a trip to dentist, Carol Potter’s concern is human mystery. Giving equal weight to inner and outer landscapes, she evokes a woman’s memories, dreams, and sensual experience. The poems in this original first collection intimate, lyrical, quizzical, surreal. My favorite among them have the vulnerability and eroticism of skin.”
—Joan Larkin
“I admire the power of Carol Potter’s dry, dreamy, country voice, its joyful sexuality, its insights, its understated humor. This is an odd and shrewd and most valuable book.”
—Jean Valentine
