If I Could Give You a Line: poems

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.

61 pages, Paperback

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.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the cleverness of this book, the poet’s dynamic lines, the attention to time and direction as a way of seeing the world anew. A great poetry book!

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

So you know the book is about lines, and especially the line that connects me to you, or you to the poem Carrie Oeding has written, or you to art, or you to what you think about people who write poems about babies. Or write poems about being anxious about babies, or being a mother, or the general cultural attitude about babies. And if you’re having a relationship right now with the attitude that I know you know I know what you’re thinking, you start to get the feeling of reading Carrie Oeding’s speaker. She’s there, and she’s already thinking what you’re thinking, even if that’s not what you’re thinking, she is telling you you should at least be thinking something about that while you’re reading her poems.

But she’s also thinking about that room Robert Frost put a poem in. Where the poem is speaking in a tone of voice. And you don’t have to think about the words articulated by the voice, because there’s so much communicated by the voice’s tone. And the poems here are, like, but what do you hear in that tone. What were you thinking using that tone of voice. There’s a lot in the poems that are talking directly at you, and saying what would be said to you if you were thinking that thing. And of course you know you were, the poems keep saying. Like if you took those two poems people are always reading by Robert Frost, and you put them in a room, and you told them it was a Robert Frost poem in the room, they would imagine a tone of voice that is very similar in both those poems. It would be kind of predictable.

And that’s the spot Oeding writes her book from. When you’re a woman, it’s very predictable someone is going to say this to you. When you’re a mother, it’s very predictable someone will say this to you. Or, at least, when Oeding says it it feels like you should have known that person was going to say that as soon you saw them. It's what's novel about what's predictable that is the surprise of the poem. And the poems are all those things you should have said, or maybe you shouldn’t have said to that person’s face, but you should definitely say to your reflection in the mirror later that night, imagining exactly how they would take it. Like being a teenager in the 90s, and you would say, “Oh. Burn!” Except now you’re in your 40s, and when you say something so cutting it gets to the quick of the person you’re talking back to, there’s something more sophisticated to it. That’s the tone of voice in Oeding’s poems. That’s what would be going on in that Robert Frost room. But make it an art installation. Put a card at the entrance identifying the art piece: If I Could Give You a Line. Imagine all the domestic noises inside it. Accompanying the poet’s voice. And know that somewhere in that tone of voice is a line, and whatever you could think about lines is in that tone. And also all the things that would surprise you someone in a room knows about lines is in that tone.

[JulieAlice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oeding's book, If I Could Give You A Line, lived up to its reviews on the back cover.