On Subjects of Which We Know Nothing

"What are these? Birds passing over at midnight? Light speeding sideways? Or call them poems and their marvelous footnotes, just for now: in On Subjects of Which We Know Nothing, Karen Carcia has made a heartbreakingly beautiful thing of them, these poems, these stars or birds begun as poems and then--having traveled by footnote!--ending either fathoms deep inside themselves or far out into deep space, I can't tell which, just somewhere dark and quiet enough to truly perceive "the mechanics of moonlight" or the silences of a map. I could travel these distances with Carcia over and over: how lovingly she remembers anything a mere numeral might have effaced." --Nancy Eimers "Karen Carcia is among the few voices in poetry genuinely receptive enough to track the crisscrossings of perceptions, and this collection is the most curious I have read in a long while. Curious: all the way back to cure, care. These poems tender a caring place for truth, as if, in truth, the beautiful could not be more close at hand. And, then, the footnotes: stars that shine from under our feet, sourcing our daily longing for connection to the quiddities, essences that are themselves perceptions and voicings--of anything we might ever hope to ask of required reading." --William Olsen