The Garden
Julie Carr
Pamenar Press + Essay Press
2025

///////// 150 Pages
///////// 17 x  22.8 cm
ISBN: 978-1-915341-27-3
 
The Garden, is the book one of the trilogy Overflow, dedicates itself to two seminal figures in Carr’s life: the painter Tony Robbin, who paints four-dimensional space, and the theoretical physicist, feminist, and philosopher, Karen River Barad. 
 
Through a spirited series of fractured and interwoven narratives, The Garden reorients themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship, and grief. The garden, as a foundational site of fallness, separation, and loss, is also where we discover desire, becoming, and poiesis. This work of essay-auto-fiction embraces the porous vulnerability of beings appearing in the overflow, the violence and rapture of the ongoing “now.”  A city is invaded as a lost child is found, a swastika reanimates itself across the internet, a bullet grazes a girl in parking lot, a Moroccan Jewish grandmother witnesses Operation Torch from a Casablanca rooftop, a boy raised in Yokohama in the aftermath of the atomic blasts grows up to father a baby with a hole in his heart: these moments that resound backwards and at the same time shoot forwards, this “oftening, over-and-overing, and aftering,” is what we call history.
 
 
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The question of who we are in relationship to the violences we live with is front and center in Julie Carr’s cinematic and transformational new book. These violences inform everything, from what we grow and eat, to how we work and love, and, perhaps most importantly, to how we survive the apocalypse of our own bodies. These beautiful narratives cross continents, decades, and portals to situate us in a world where everything is normal and exploding at the same time, where art, empire and fascism are entangled with science, technology, and the tenderness of intimacy and grief. "The music as a black hole”: this too is desire amid the endless poetry of disappearance, decay and collapse. 
 
— Daniel Borzutzky
 
 
 
In The Garden, the poet Julie Carr asks, “What world would unfold, what lifeways result once we all learned to see as my uncle saw—in four, rather than three, spatial dimensions?” Carr’s writing unmoors knowledges, bidden and unbidden, that enter and shape us, our perceptions, and those we love. She is alert to history, to the frailties of the body, and to the specificities and betrayals of both. 
 
Here is the everydayness of violence, of tenderness and desire—the tense and taste of it like places, “where I will never have yet been.”
 
The Garden is filled with a deep and feeling intelligence that will stay with and work on me for some time.
 
 
— Christina Sharpe
 
 
What was pain and from where did it arrive’, Julie Carr’s new book wonders: from history, from the nucleus, or screen; is it in the water, the land, sky or self? The Garden somehow manages to dream and see clearly, through the fallout of the centuries’ violence, or the bullet hole in today’s shirt.
 
Echoing ghost stories told by Maimonides and Celan, listening in to the confessions of friends and suicides, dancing and sleeping, Carr’s lucid prose is built in sentences ‘which we, like sailors, believed to be paradise’. But if ‘Paradise is only ever a thought,’ it can be found here – a site of damage and loss, guarded by a flaming sword.
 
Enter the garden: you’ll find it abandoned like the great books, burnt, abundant. It is a place for thinking about what ‘we destroy by using it too well’: whether that’s the earth itself, or the one who says so, and has the power to leave.”

— Andrea Brady
 
 
Julie Carr  is the author of over thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (University of Nebraska Press 2023) and Underscore (Omnidawn Books 2024). Earlier books include Climate, co-written with Lisa Olstein (Essay Press 2022), Real Life: An Installation(Omnidawn Books 2018), Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta 2017), and Someone Shot my Book (University of Michigan Press 2018). In 2023 Omnidawn Books reissued her 2010 book, 100 Notes on Violence. With Jeffrey Robinson she is the co-editor of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press 2015). Her co-translations (with Jennifer Pap) of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess—The Factory and The Book of Skies were published by Commune Editions and Pamenar Press, respectively. The Book of Skies appeared with Pamenar Press in 2024. Overflow, a trilogy, will be published sequentially over the next few years.
 
Carr has recently collaborated with dance artists K.J. Holmes, video artist and poet Carolina Ebeid, and composer Ben Roberts. With Tim Roberts she is the co-founder of Counterpath Press, Counterpath Gallery, and Counterpath Community Garden in Denver. She hosts the podcast Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone.
 
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**You can order this book from our website, from Essay Press, or from Asterism Books in the US.