A Bouquet of Glass - by Carol Krause (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

What are you left with when glass shatters? Emerging from a mind with a propensity for the otherworldly and an unsuitability for the worldly, A Bouquet of Glass gathers the fragments of different realities into a vivid, piercing collection. These poems are the extra-ordinary stories of a poet living with a naturally psychoactive mind and a life-altering disability. From heightened altered states to spacious musings and playful concoctions, they are disarmingly human notes of love and loss. At once elegy and wild romp, they invite different pieces of a life to exist together uneasily, gracefully, precariously. You may wish to curl up with this book on one side of the glass, but only once a whirling storm has rushed through.

Review Quotes

These vital and visceral prose poems map the surreal landscape of a mind altered, altared, each word at once a bloom and a shard. "Something resembling joy" rushes through a crack in the world, and Krause takes us to the other side.
--JODY CHAN, author of impact statement and sick, winner of the Trillium Award for Poetry

In eerily gorgeous poetry, Carol Krause has left us a burning trail through her particular flavours of brilliance and madness. I finish this book not only feeling connected to her exposed heart, but being re-sensitized to look for hidden doors to other realities in this world in desperate need of new visions.
--SASCHA ALTMAN DUBRUL, author of Maps to the Other Side: the adventures of a bipolar cartographer

This collection of electrifying prose poems goes beyond the glass with raw honesty, showing us the beauty in a spiritual experience of birds landing on rooftops, the joy and pain of living when it is hard to delineate the "inside" from the "outside" world, and the resilience life takes as someone with mental divergence. It leads the reader into understanding what it can be like to live with a disability. Most of all, this book is an invitation to see the importance and beauty of a life lived at the edges because "when we lie flat on the ground, our eyes inside of the sky. People like you. Well, you might want to join us."
--PAOLA FERRANTE, author of Her Body Among Animals and What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack

In A Bouquet of Glass, Carol Krause uses language and forms that are intricate, fertile, fresh, and wonderfully strange, to invite us into the beautiful and hopeful paradox that these poems themselves could salve the agony they describe. A work of art that affirms life, in its courage to fearlessly elucidate what denies it.
--THEA LIM, author of An Ocean of Minutes

Carol Krause is a gifted wordsmith, and when a cardinal lands on her ear, the poems in A Bouquet of Glass take flight, splintering into multiple, kaleidoscopic realities. This is a work of searching beauty that asks readers to surrender to the prismatic nature of poetry.
--JIM JOHNSTONE, author of The King of Terrors

Through visceral sensory imagery, Carol Krause manifests: rest as resistance, nature as solace and camaraderie, excruciation of mundanity, kaleidoscope of other worlds, lives not lived, intimacy of platonic and altered states. A Bouquet of Glass leaves you with lines to return to and linger on. The poems etch themselves into you, finding belonging.
--MUGABI BYENKYA, award-winning author of Dear Philomena, Songs For Wo(Men) and Songs For Wo(Men) 2

In eerily gorgeous poetry, Carol Krause has left us a burning trail through her particular flavours of brilliance and madness. I finish this book not only feeling connected to her exposed heart, but being re-sensitized to look for hidden doors to other realities in this world in desperate need of new visions.

--SASCHA ALTMAN DUBRUL, author of Maps to the Other Side: the adventures of a bipolar cartographer

Carol Krause is a gifted wordsmith, and when a cardinal lands on her ear, the poems in A Bouquet of Glass take flight, splintering into multiple, kaleidoscopic realities. This is a work of searching beauty that asks readers to surrender to the prismatic nature of poetry.

--JIM JOHNSTONE, author of The King of Terrors

In A Bouquet of Glass, Carol Krause uses language and forms that are intricate, fertile, fresh, and wonderfully strange, to invite us into the beautiful and hopeful paradox that these poems themselves could salve the agony they describe. A work of art that affirms life, in its courage to fearlessly elucidate what denies it.

--THEA LIM, author of An Ocean of Minutes

Through visceral sensory imagery, Carol Krause manifests: rest as resistance, nature as solace and camaraderie, excruciation of mundanity, kaleidoscope of other worlds, lives not lived, intimacy of platonic and altered states. A Bouquet of Glass leaves you with lines to return to and linger on. The poems etch themselves into you, finding belonging.

--MUGABI BYENKYA, award-winning author of Dear Philomena, Songs For Wo(Men) and Songs For Wo(Men) 2

These vital and visceral prose poems map the surreal landscape of a mind altered, altared, each word at once a bloom and a shard. "Something resembling joy" rushes through a crack in the world, and Krause takes us to the other side.

--JODY CHAN, author of impact statement and sick, winner of the Trillium Award for Poetry

This collection of electrifying prose poems goes beyond the glass with raw honesty, showing us the beauty in a spiritual experience of birds landing on rooftops, the joy and pain of living when it is hard to delineate the "inside" from the "outside" world, and the resilience life takes as someone with mental divergence. It leads the reader into understanding what it can be like to live with a disability. Most of all, this book is an invitation to see the importance and beauty of a life lived at the edges because "when we lie flat on the ground, our eyes inside of the sky. People like you. Well, you might want to join us."

--PAOLA FERRANTE, author of Her Body Among Animals and What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack

About the Author

Carol Krause is a poet whose uncontainable mind often disrupts her plans. Sometimes this results in joy. Carol's poetry has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Arc Poetry, and PRISM international, among other publications. A lover of the underworld, Carol feels most alive crawling through caves. A Bouquet of Glass is her first poetry collection. She lives in Toronto.