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Oak Cradle poetry by Chantel L. Carlson
In 2011 photographer Karen Gros made a series of images featuring Emily Knobloch in her family home in Thibodaux, Louisiana, along with heirloom objects found in her attic—old photographs, furniture, and a black linen mourning dress. What Gros never could have predicted is that ninety days after these images were taken, her eighteen-year-old son, Garrett, would die by suicide. He drove his car head on into an oak tree. Gros literally became the mourning woman in the images, and her photography became a way for her to cope with this unimaginable loss. Poet Chantel L. Carlson saw the images in 2015 and immediately wanted to know the underlying narrative.Their ensuing conversations about grief, loss, and perseverance resulted in this magnificent collection of poems and photographs intended to support and remind grieving individuals that they are not alone. PHOTOGRAPH / General ISBN: 978-1-962082-19-8(print; softcover; perfect bound) Released January 2024 | Copyright 2024 72 pages; 24 photographs |
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Chantel L. Carlson is an Instructor of English at Texas Christian University, where she teaches creative writing, drama and performance studies, poetry, and film/visual culture. She is a playwright, poet, and photographer. Her one-act plays, Six Feet Apart and The Exhibit, were published by Next Stage Press, and her dramatic scene “Distance” was published in Writing Texas. In addition, her poetry has appeared in The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume VIII: Texas, Writing Texas, Unlocking the Word: An Anthology of Found Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, TEJASCOVIDO, and Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing. Her poetry chapbook, Turning 25, was published by Nous-zot Press. She lives in Texas with her family. Karen D. Gros has built successful businesses in both piano performance/pedagogy and portrait photography. Driven by a fervent dedication to creative expression and a desire to make a meaningful impact through visual narratives, she engages with audiences in a way that is both authentic and compelling.Blurring the lines between life and art, she reminds us that the world around us is a constantly evolving canvas waiting to be explored and transformed.Whether through photography or other forms of art, Karen believes that life imitates art and that our experiences are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves. Her photography has appeared in Writing Texas. In addition to her photography work, Karen is an Entrepreneur and Creative Director, with a talent for creating compelling images, messages, and campaigns. Karen is based in the vibrant city of New Orleans, where she draws inspiration from the city’s rich culture and history.
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“Oak Cradle is a magnificent work of both visual and literary art. Chantel L. Carlson’s poetry is rich, layered, gorgeous, and lyrical. Each poem evokes the haunting quality of grief that mirrors the southern Louisiana landscape so perfectly rendered in each photograph. The great hope in the dark tunnel of grief is that traveling through its dark tunnels might yield something useful, beautiful, or true, and this book offers some of the most hopeful words I've ever read.” “Oak Cradle is a stunning collaboration that explores the losses that haunt us. This collection highlights the ways a place is always braided with loss—the insects, the streets, and the weather are grief's daily refrain. Poet Chantel L. Carlson and photographer Karen Gros create a dialogue of silences and stillnesses across text and image that enacts ‘grief without a safety net.’ Both writer and artist know how to distill loss, but together the conversation on mourning becomes more complex. Between these pages are bereaved geographies, haunted light, a reclamation of self, the ghosts we knew that know us still.” “Where might grief take us, and what do we do when we get there? How do we breathe when grief is a ‘choking canary buried in coal,’ when our own womb ‘is now an aching tomb?’ In this visceral, devastating lamentation, Chantel L. Carlson examines grief, time, and fate through ekphrastic poems that imagine one woman’s journey through mourning her son’s death by suicide. Karen Gros’s photographs provide visual anchors for the imagination as the words and images come together like the joints and sinew of a single body. This collection moved me to consider my own grief as part of a broader picture. It invited me to wonder what it might be like when, after capturing grief in ‘a jar-tight lid,’ one day I am able to ‘open / the lid and / watch it go.’” “From the first image and the first poem, ‘On With The Show,’ this collection is an intimate performance of words and images, like shadow play. Here, grief is a stage where we face the inescapable shadow of loss and longing. This book was born from a mother's grief for her son, and the poems and photographs tell that specific story through an openness so that anyone who's lost a loved one to death will find their lonely struggle represented in these pages. The stunning photo of giant live oak trees lining a New Orleans street paired with ‘Before The Rain’ provides an unflinchingly honest path toward healing. The way through is to be stubborn as a plant with ‘neglect burned into each edge’ and march on to the ‘syncopated rhythm’ of both nature and society. Oak Cradle shows us how we might ‘close the coffin’ on our ghost stories by persevering through the howling field of grief to what comes next.” | |||||||||||||||
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