Set in Stone

Name: Set in Stone
SKU: 7951
Price: 16.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Kevin Carey

$16.00

Carey’s poems tell stories—as dreams, as memories, as rituals or ceremonies. He embraces the mystery of nostalgia, worn and cemented by time, the haunted remembrances that string a life together. These are poems of place and of people (real and imagined); poems about summer ponds and barroom nights, basketball, religion, and superheroes; poems that remind us of our humanness; poems set in stone to be chipped away at carefully.

Categories: All Books, Emerging Voices, Kevin Carey, Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Poetry Tags: 2020, basketball, Boston, Bridges, Emerging Voices, Kevin Carey, Poetry, Set in Stone, Suicide

Meet the Author

Photo by Mark Hillringhouse

Kevin Carey is the coordinator of creative writing at Salem State University. He is a poet, filmmaker, fiction writer, and playwright. His latest full-length play, The Stand or Sal Is Dead, premiered at the Actor’s Studio in Newburyport, MA in 2018. In recent years he has co-directed and co-produced two documentary films about poets (Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Malcolm Miller). His books include a chapbook of fiction, The Beach People, and two collections of poetry, The One Fifteen to Penn Station and Jesus Was a Homeboy. Kevin’s poems have appeared twice on the National Public Radio show The Writer’s Almanac and on the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day. Kevincareywriter.com

Critic Reviews

When I think of a Kevin Carey poem, I think of Boston, and basketball, of poems carved out of the East Coast city where he has lived his life. In this, his third book, Carey has wrought arguably his finest work, including one of the most poignant poems of a friend’s suicide I have ever read. There are narratives here, list poems, lyrics, and elegies, a hint of Catholicism found in a mother’s rosary beads, a father praying after work, and the specificity of old Buicks and the Tobin Bridge. This is a book of powerful testaments that will offer any open reader, like in basketball, “that first good step” toward survival.

-Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Second O of Sorrow

In this collection, Carey examines the power of memory, the dreams we have, the praiseworthy moments, as well as the regrets that cling to us over a lifetime. Set in Stone shoots straight, with a voice that is natural and unaffected. You may see yourself in the small dark places of these poems, if you’re not too timid to look.

-Jeffrey Renard Allen, author of the novels Song of the Shank and Rails Under My Back

Excerpts

From “Set in Stone”

A train blows its horn
the light rising beyond the harbor,
a dog barks from a car window
and the nostalgia (always dangerous)
hits me like a left hook.
I’m trapped between the memory
and the moment,
the deal we make
if we make it this long,
the markers of a life,
the small worthwhile pieces
that rattle around in my pockets
waiting to be set somewhere in stone

From “A Long Line”

I come from a long line
of beach front vendors
caramel popcorn hawkers
bartenders fry cookers

A long line of coffee pushers
Crackerjack stumpers
cheeseburg makers

A long line of saw-dust
footed, hotdog dragging
cigarette smoking
liquor-swabbing drink men