An Ocean of Static

by J.R. Carpenter

From the late 15th century onwards, a flurry of voyages were made into the North Atlantic in search of fish, the fabled Northwest Passage, and beyond into the territories purely imaginary. Today, this vast expanse is crisscrossed with ocean and wind currents, submarine cables and wireless signals, seabirds and passengers, static and cargo ships.

In her long-awaited poetry debut, award-winning digital writer and artist J.R. Carpenter transforms the dense, fragmented archive of the North Atlantic into an astonishing sea of fresh new text. Cartographic and maritime vernaculars inflected with the syntax and grammar of ships logs and code languages splinter and pulse across the page.

Haunting, politically charged and formally innovative, An Ocean of Static presents an ever-shifting array of variables. Amid global currents of melting sea ice and changing ocean currents, Carpenter charts the elusive passages of women and animals, of indigenous people and migrants, of strange noises and phantom islands.

Genres: Poetry

150 pages, Paperback

Published April 24, 2018

About the author

J. R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, and lecturer in the School of English at University of Leeds. Her debut collection, An Ocean of Static (Penned in the Margins 2018), was Highly Commended for the Forward Prize. This is a Picture of Wind (Longbarrow Press) was listed in The Guardian's best poetry books of 2020. Her most recent collection, Measures of Weather, was shortlisted for the Laurel Prize and was The Observer's poetry book of the month for February 2025. For more information visit: https://luckysoap.com

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

J.R. Carpenter’s form-defying poetry debut, ‘An Ocean of Static’, is instantly one of the most difficult and most memorable books of poetry I’ve read in some time. Arranged as “scripts... retain[ing] traces of the syntax and grammar of code languages”, these poems blow apart the poetic form from within, enabling an overwhelming multiplicity of language and logic and meaning. Carpenter uses North Atlantic voyages, bodies of water and space, and disembodied voices in disparate but interlinked poems, composed with other people’s words (including Conrad, Shakespeare, Hakluyt and more), to create a tapestry of emptiness sometimes rippled with movement and noise in a perpetual quest for answers and meaning.

[Chris Bookley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Variable.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked how many different ways you can read JR Carpenter's work. It's like a chose-your-own-adventure, but for poetry. It's a work that deserves several reads. I found I had to be in the right frame of mind to read/do, because the reader is such an integral part of the poetry. When I was though I was right there, on the sea, on land and in the post-apocalyptic world - they were the vibes I was getting anyway! I enjoyed myself a lot.

[Gudrun Filipska · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poetry documents a complicated Cartography of the North Atlantic. J.R. Carpenter intricately overlays the lines of shipping routes, signals sent by wireless morse code clicks and the trajectories drawn from colonial desires and pioneering fantasy with the contemporary internet networks which connect us instantly through cables running deep under the Ocean below circle route shipping trajectories.
The book itself reads as points of intermittent clarity through radio static -
messages received, messages missed and lost. The idea of ghosts present through out. Carpenter uses the esoteric vernacular of shipping and meteorology; rolling lists speaking of forecasts, hydrographic geographies and ship-supply inventories.
In style, the book lies somewhere in between historical text, performance document and prose poem, structurally echoing early digital source code code or scrolling html Marqee text.

Give this book to someone...from the itinerant artist to the landlocked retiree, these are networks which touch us all.

[Oz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems that ring with the madness of the sea. I think I understood one word in every five, and enjoyed the chaos. Poems about the sea and about life were better than the ones about poetry and writing it.

[Goodreeds User · Rating 4 out of 5]

warm and cold and fuzzy