An Evening with Carrie Etter

Join award-winning poet Carrie Etter at The Grove Bookshop for readings and discussion of her latest collection, Grief's Alphabet (Seren Books).

Date: Thursday, 6 February

Time: 8-9pm

Tickets: £7*

Tickets can be purchased in the shop or here via Eventbrite (includes a booking fee).

*Please note, if you've booked a place for the workshop with Carrie at 7pm, you automatically have a place reserved for the reading at 8pm and won't need a ticket.

Refreshments will be served.

Our Guest

American expatriate Carrie Etter has published four collections of poetry, including The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Prize, and Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. She also edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010), a TLS Book of the Year, and Linda Lamus’s posthumous collection, A Crater the Size of Calcutta (Mulfran, 2015). Individual poems have appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. She also writes short stories, essays, and reviews, and has received grants from Arts Council England and The Society of Authors. After many years teaching at Bath Spa University, in 2022 Etter joined the creative writing faculty at the University of Bristol.

About the book:

Carrie Etter’s Grief’s Alphabet is a shattering elegy for the poet’s mother, opening a pathway through grief in spite of the impossible task of expressing such a loss. The collection evokes the complex, intimate relationship of a mother and daughter and thus the magnitude of the mother’s death.

The collection begins both chronologically and alphabetically with ‘An Adoption in 360°’, ‘Bigamy,’ etc., an order which breaks down quickly in the face of loss. The early poems portray the family from its beginnings with the narrator’s adoption through adolescence, addressing experiences of bereavement, poverty, attempted suicide, and teenage pregnancy in such vivid poems as ‘The House of Two Weathers, or the Years after the Layoff’ and ‘Pregnant Teenager & Her Mama.’

The second section, ‘The Brink,’ wrenchingly conveys the mother’s unexpected death and the banal yet painful aftermath of sorting clothes, finding the will, and arranging the funeral, as well as the first excruciating months of mourning. The final section, ‘Orphan Age,’ presents life after loss through the long work of grieving. Memories return involuntarily in ‘the whiff of not quite nostalgia’ in ‘M Is Usually Memory and Occasionally McDonald’s’ and in familiar food in ‘Ode to Tuna Casserole.’ The abecedarian title poem, ‘Grief’s Alphabet,’ brings together the whole, from the mother’s disappointed aspiration to become a teacher, to her abrupt decline, to the speaker’s grief, regret, and renewal.

In its raw yet deft evocation of a mother and daughter’s relationship, Grief’s Alphabet celebrates love in the same breath as it weeps for its loss.

Photo credit: Fabrizia Costa.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Grove Bookshop, 10 The Grove, Ilkley, United Kingdom