Carter, Pamela Hobart: Her Imaginary Museum

Kelsay Books, chapbook

Publication Date: November 21, 2020

Publisher Marketing:
Pamela Hobart Carter's chapbook Her Imaginary Museum delights with the rich correspondences she inspires. Drawing from works of art from artists as varied as Wassily Kandinsky, Teresita Fernandez, and John Feodorov, to name a few, these poems strike me more as dance choreography than simply as ekphrastic responses. There is plenty of twist and swing here, between writer and reader, between writer and the work of art she beholds, between the artworks and the reader's own knowledge of them. I like the reverberations, the colors, the questions that surface. Above all, I welcome the spirits of the dead Carter invites to join in the dance, the ever-turning cycle of creation.

Claudia Castro Luna, Washington State Poet Laureate (2018 - 2021) and author of Killing Marias and One River, A Thousand Voices

Imagine a museum where subjects step out of paintings and mingle with the real world. Pamela Hobart Carter fuses art and life in Her Imaginary Museum then gives the reader a private tour. Each page holds a lushly painted poem that both elevates the quotidian into high art and grounds the masterpieces. With Carter serving as docent, we see the humor of Gaugin, the impossibility of Dalí, and the way a goalbox frames an arcing kick into a work of art. This is a poet that promises, "Now you have seen/what the artist dreamed. / Now you dream. Now / you see."

Heidi Seaborn, Author of Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do}

Pam Carter's poems exemplify the wisdom of William Blake that poetry is addressed to Vision. Her poetry illuminates both Art and the Ordinary and demonstrates not only that the Ordinary is the proper subject of all art but also that even capital-A Art returns to the ordinary. On the highest level, they represent seeing, not merely through the eyes but with them.

Omar Willey, Publisher of The Seattle Star and author of Polyphony