Julie Carr

"Objects from a Borrowed Confession includes an epistolary novella, two essays, an experimental memoir, a letter, and a series of other prose works all circling the theme of confession. The book takes up questions of desire, loneliness, anger, envy, and grief as it considers what drives us to confess. Is confession "truth telling," or more a way to invent a narrative of selfhood? In confessing are we asking to be absolved, or seeking to be made whole? What is intimacy and is it possible to forge an intimacy with someone you have never met? Is love a feeling or a condition? Does the self exist once the mind is lost? What, finally, is the value of having and confessing a "self" in the face of violence and loss" --

Objects from a Borrowed Confession

Poems

Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines

Product Description: Carr, winner of the 2009 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, obsessively researches intimate terrorism, looking everywhere from Whitman and Dickinson to lists of phobias and weapon-store catalogs for answers. Do they lie in statistics, in statements by and about rapists and killers, in the capacity for cruelty that the poet herself admits to? This book is a dream-document both of light and innocence-babies and the urge to protect them-and of giving in to a wrenching darkness, where despair lies in the very fact that no single factor is to blame.

100 Notes on Violence

2023 Big Other Book Award Nonfiction Finalist Populism has become a global movement associated with nationalism and strong-man politicians, but its root causes remain elusive. Mud, Blood, and Ghosts exposes one deep root in the soil of the American Great Plains. Julie Carr traces her own family’s history through archival documents to draw connections between U.S. agrarian populism, spiritualism, and eugenics, helping readers to understand populism’s tendency toward racism and exclusion. Carr follows the story of her great-grandfather Omer Madison Kem, three-term Populist representative from Nebraska, avid spiritualist, and committed eugenicist, to explore persistent themes in U.S. history: property, personhood, exclusion, and belonging. While recent books have taken seriously the experiences of poor whites in rural America, they haven’t traced the story to its origins. Carr connects Kem’s journey with that of America’s white establishment and its fury of nativism in the 1920s. Presenting crucial narratives of Indigenous resistance, interracial alliance and betrayal, radical feminism, lifelong hauntings, land policy, debt, shame, grief, and avarice from the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era, Carr asks whether we can embrace the Populists’ profound hopes for a just economy while rejecting the barriers they set up around who was considered fully human, fully worthy of this dreamed society.

Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts

""Mud, Blood, and Ghosts" is a thoughtful, creative, and deeply researched story about the origins of Populism in America and its anti-immigrant and racist attitudes"--

Julie Carr

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