Carrie Etter Surreal-Absurd Sampler

In this issue of Surreal-Absurd we have poems from Carrie Etter, from her collection Imagined Sons, a book of poems on the experience of giving up a child for adoption, in which she imagines the possible destinies for the child presenting various scenarios, from the tragic to the absurd, and also from her pamphlet, The Shooting Gallery, in which she juxtaposes two series of prose poems: one exploring Czech surrealist Toyen’s World War II line drawings and one addressing US school and university shootings since Columbine High School in 1999. Here is her statement:

“At times it seems the surreal can convey the truth of an experience or emotion most accurately--that only by changing or bending the rules of what's possible can we appreciate how something in the world works. Imagined Sons couldn't fully represent what it is to be a birthmother by simply presenting real young men in the world whom the surrendered son grew up to be--it has to show the imaginative life, impossible situations that nonetheless convey something true about the birthmother's experience. While I have written a handful of surreal poems in lines, I tend to employ the prose poem for the surreal--its brevity and compactness help support that suspension of disbelief--or rather create a space where you can disbelieve all you want, but I'm still going to declare this is happening anyway.”— Carrie Etter

Carrie Etter has published four books and eight chapbooks of poetry, including Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014) and The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren; US: Station Hill, 2018). Individual poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, The TLS, and elsewhere. She is Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

The poems are taken from Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014) and The Shooting Gallery (Verve, 2020).