Wet

Wick First Book

by Carolyn Creedon

“I’m moved by the way that Carolyn Creedon’s work treats experience as sacred. She won’t look away from difficult truths. She writes frankly about her own frustrations, longings, and heartbreaks, but she also recognizes the suffering of others—their secret grievances and griefs. The daily working world is here in full measure. And yet there’s an oddly religious feeling that keeps breaking through this volume, which cherishes the small things, the lesser divinities, and ends with a prayer. It heartens me to welcome this fiery and fervent book, this wet collection, into the world.”

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 2012

Reviews

[silas denver melvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

deserves 10x the attention it's received

[Leila · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was so…unexpectedly and delightfully not pretentious?

Much of this includes a level of society that most people don’t pay much attention to. Waitresses, prostitutes, bartenders, people drinking warm Bud. The decidedly not middle class life. And it’s just lovely.

How to Be a Cowgirl in a Studio Apartment might be my favorite.

There is a fun retelling of the Old Woman and the Shoe.

This made me laugh because, truth:

“She’s thirty-six. She’s a thousand years old.”

And this:

“to you, too, over there,

Wearing your height-enhancing Texas cowboy boots
And your is-it-big-enough neurosis like a grin”

Delightful overall and worth checking out.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most enjoyed “On Receiving an Invitation to Denbigh High School’s Twentieth Reunion,” “Stone,” “Hysteria,” and, of course, “Litany.”

“Litany” was the work that drew me to this collection. I was attracted to its frank, conversational style. Most of the other works failed to live up to that styles expectations. Instead, they sounded straight out of the Iowa Writers Workshop. Still, this collection has some gems.

[Arkskier · Rating 2 out of 5]

Creedon's poem "Litany" is, in my opinion, the single best poem in The Best American Poetry 1993, edited by Louise Gluck. It had a sincere, gentle roughness to it, an unmannered innocence that attracted me. She sounded like Kim Addonizio, like a waitress in a seedy restaurant who beds strangers. So I was excited to read Creedon's first book, Wet.

Unlike the unmannered charm of "Litany," however, many of the poems in Wet suffer from that adjective-y, wordy poetic diction and formal blandness of many American MFA students, in general, and the rather learned, cloying sensuousness of many female poets, in particular. Was it her MFA education after 1993 that caused this change? Maybe. I hope her second book will be less self-conscious.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the poems here, especially "Litany," are just stellar. I have a number of poems dog-eared because they do things I do not generally do in poetry but find really intriguing and helpful. But many of them do more than fall flat, they offend.

Just as I finished the first section, I thought to myself, "Why is this book in sections?" I can so rarely tell with contemporary poetry books why poets add sections--like, I'm sure they see some connection but it feels like more an artifact of their process and anything useful for a reader. Then I read the second section and DEFINITELY saw a theme--and not a pretty one. Generously, I'll say chunks of this book, many of them in the second section, did not age well. Creedon does that thing where she writes beautifully about the poor, the misbegotten, the struggling. To me this type of poem is condescending; it's an author "humanizing" people who society overlooks. And on the surface this seems fine. But, like, people don't need your humanizing, poet; they are already fully human. To seek to humanize those who never asked you to just points to the fact that YOU failed to see them as human in the first place. UGH. UHG. So yeah, after the second section I was a little over this.

[Corin · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[Alex Myers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the poems that had mythological themes - these were by far my favorite because I enjoyed the interplay of modern themes/sensibility with the familiar tales (particularly Medusa). Throughout, the author's diction is amazing: word choice that made me read lines again and again. My one complaint would be the order of the poems. I found that at times the sequence had too many of a similar theme in a row or the opposite: too jarring of a contrast.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's a link to a review I wrote about Wet: http://www.triquarterly.org/reviews/r...
It's a terrific book!

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The absolute best