Why Misread a Cloud

“In these spare, bladed, sometime single-sentence, prose poems, Emily Carlson asks us not to let the curtain fall because, ‘what we don’t see, remains.’ These are compassionate, but blistering, poems of witness that twine together the violence, injustices, and ruination of two wartime geographies: the 2006 Lebanon War and the United States police militarization in an historically Black neighborhood. From ‘plumes of ash’ to ‘midnight ash’ to ‘wedding dress ash,’ Why Misread a Cloud spotlights collapse while simultaneously providing an umbilical cord to hope, because amid fear and devastation, is a newborn as well as a child who simply states, “My favorite part of me are my eyes because they let me see the beautiful world.”

—Simone Muench

“In a dizzying and cinematic sequence, the prose poems that embody Why Misread a Cloud juxtapose images of war with the images of the everyday. Crucially accompanying these sensory moments of alarm are chasms of silence. What these jagged sequences and disruptions urge the reader to do is see that a cloud can transform into a fighter jet’s contrail. And just like that, the roar of a sonic boom disrupts what has been taken for granted. Emily Suzanne Carlson’s razor-sharp language urges us to look deeply at the contours of the sky and learn how, even at the edges of a peaceful horizon, there is the capacity for storm.”

—Oliver de la Paz

“Beautiful and searing, the short prose poems of Why Misread a Cloud accrue like snowflakes against a fence, using their delicate weight to allow us to better see what’s right in front of us. Grounded in body and place, they offer not so much an account as an experience: of the fragmented moments that assemble into histories; of the disorientation of violence as it plays out across cities, homes, people; of the way the I evaporates in stages under such conditions even as it persists, which means continues to exist. F16s interrupt an afternoon of coffee and cherries. Sound cannons blare behind an infant nursing. By one imperative or another, people are forced from their homes. Here, without losing their specificity, different violences are allowed to drift and merge, to reveal their sameness, as Emily Suzanne Carlson points us toward ours.”

—Lisa Olstein

“‘I needed only to let the curtain fall’ Carlson writes in the introduction to her searing and tender poems, acknowledging at the outset her skin privilege to not see state-sponsored violence—the atrocities of Lebanon’s 2006 war as it unfolds around her, merging, decades later, with the atrocities of police violence against her Black neighbors at home in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty. Carlson’s poems enact the very opposite of not seeing, framing fragments of testimony in high relief: Black families sirened from sleep, an Israeli machine gunner’s face in close-up, aftermath of oil pouring into the sea. ‘Would you call it war or invasion?’ she asks, a question initially applicable to either scene, ‘My neighbors empty-handed in the street…’ In the empty hands is gentleness too as, elsewhere, a child lifts dolls through a missing door, or Marvin Gaye’s voice drifts above the poised rifles in police raid. Details of time and place repeatedly slip into a singular nightmare that haunts the narrator, yet she does not turn away. In exacting, sensorial language Carlson illuminates the heightened edges that trauma and love evoke, asking us to bear witness with her, while centering a question: ‘whose evacuation, whose drinks on a silver tray, whose mountain, whose moon.’ The question, unanswered, hangs in the page’s white space. This is powerful, wrenching work whose every line makes me feel my heart, want to see.”

—Meg Shevenock, Author of The Miraculous, Sometimes