The Poetry of Doritt Carroll

The Poetry of Doritt Carroll

Zoom Event

Thursday, May 13, 2021,  at 7:00 pm

   FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Award-winning poet Doritt Carroll, an Arts Club member, will do a virtual reading from her chapbook A Meditation on Purgatory, for which she won Harbor Review’s 2020 Laura Lee Washburn  prize.  It will be followed by an interview with Doritt, exploring her conceptions of and approach to her own poetry and poetry at large.

Doritt’s poetry is unique in several respects:  Consistently surprising, sharp, incisive, witty and sensitive at the same time, and as powerful as a knock-out martini in its mind spinning effects. Of Doritt’s A Meditation on Purgatory, Laura Lee Washburn says:

“my mother eats ice cream while dying” begins, “bird boned and buckle-mouthed she draws / on chocolate clown lips with the spoon.” Hand to heart, if that doesn’t make you open this book and read, I don’t know what would. These poems are elegiac and lovely, replete with sorrow and heart warmth. The language is precise, as in these lines about martinis whose “windex taste of solitude bites / our tongues.” Detailed and beautiful, the moments in these poems genuinely move. She writes lines you’ll want to quote, metaphors you’ll wish you’d written. More than once, I found myself, saying, as the character says, “yesss.” Oh, these poems are good. From our dead that we don’t really want back (!) to the description of a husband snoring: “his lips make a sound like / he’s being defeated / in a dream argument,” to the story of a life encapsulated on a page, these ten poems are the poems you need to read today, the poems you’ll return to tomorrow

In addition to Doritt’s recent award, she was a finalist for the Julia Darling poetry prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, North American Review, Coal City Review, Eunoia Review, and Cherry Tree, among others. Her collection GLTTL STP was published by Brickhouse Books in 2013. Her chapbook Sorry You Are Not An Instant Winner was published in 2017 by Kattywompus.  Most recently, with Brickhouse Books, she established the Charlene Kushner Wicked Woman Poetry Prize for poems by and about women.

Along with her work as poet, Doritt practices fulltime as an intellectual property attorney and also serves as chair of poetry events for the Arts Club Literary Committee.

This event is open to both Arts Club members and guests.  To register for it, click this link to the Arts Club website.