If I Could Give You a Line

by Carrie Oeding

What does it mean to make something to share publicly when you are unsure of your own presence? If I Could Give You a Line cultivates the strangeness of presence in motherhood when the self is hyper-aware of its erasure. The collection explores its obsession with the physicality of visual art, down to the line, asserting and creating a voice that longs to be as present as a waver in the line of an Agnes Martin painting. A line that pulls you in to see the hand that made it. For Oeding's speakers, to look at art as mothers gives them permission to make it. Through humor, provocation, and uncertainty, this associative work builds momentary worlds of looking and connecting. The voice in these poems are confident in their performance and gesture to the reader to participate in their world-building, using materials like toddler garbage, preliterate scribbles, boiled green beans, James Turrell's skies, Cara Delevingne's eyebrows, and Yayoi Kusama's mirrors.

90 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 7, 2023

About the author

Carrie Oeding's work has appeared widely, including Best New Poets, Colorado Review, Third Coast, DIAGRAM, Mid-American Review, PBS News Hour's Art Beat, and Brevity. Her first book, OUR LIST OF SOLUTIONS, won the Lester M. Wolfson Prize and was published by 42 Miles Press from Indiana University South Bend. She is Visiting Assistant Professor at Marshall University.