Splinters

Splinters (Kelsay Books)

Carter’s Second Chapbook

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Splinters is a collection of poems about being broken, left splintered and exposed to the world. It’s relating the human experience to that of the natural world – holding a mirror to the similarities and drawing a line in the sand with differences. Charles K. Carter experiments with a variety of poetic forms including blank verse, free verse, ghazal, haiku, nirat, and prose poems.

Advanced Praise

“In Splinters, Charles K. Carter carves the weight of struggles through the words like rivers through rock. These poems are the inevitable canyons. The very first in the collection, ‘Mother’ suggests a weariness. A being who has carried the weight of the world, who has surpassed it, yet not without loss. Yet, there is comfort here. There is hope. A sign that the struggles are worth it. What can we do with the titular Splinters but to weather them off? To smooth out the trauma? Even then, those gaps remain, those tiny imperfections. But what we’ve done is enough. It has to be. We live with the wounds, but we will live on. This is the through line that vividly pulses through these poems – the kindle that ignites them all.” – Sam Jowett, author of Self

“Charles K. Carter’s heartfelt collection, Splinters, offers readers poignant glimpses of the intersections between the natural world and the human experience. Invoking a wide array of poetic traditions, Carter introduces readers to ‘the bright ones,’ then turns his eye to ‘that radio signal of hate.’ In spending time with this raw, accessible collection, readers will begin to learn ‘what hope for us there is left.’ Pulsing with love, loss, and hard-won joy, these poems are both ‘power and warning’: an exploration of what splinters us, and how we can rebuild.” – Gaia Rajan, author of Moth Funerals

“Charles K. Carter’s collection, Splinters, aims to answer the age-old question, What is love? Exploring themes such as intimacy, sexuality, family, and identity, Carter takes the reader through a hurricane of emotion. Relating weather events to daily events, Splinters offers a magnifying glass to examine how we interact with the world, and how the world interacts with us.” – Lynne Schmidt, author of Dead Dog Poems