Books
Allison Carter is the author of a book, A Fixed, Formal Arrangement (Les Figues Press) and a chapbook Shadows Are Weather (Horse Less Press).
Reviews of A Fixed, Formal Arrangement
Bookslut
DIAGRAM
NewPages
Pedestal Magazine
“…There is something both eerie and real about this microscopic world, the way one feels the first time you realize that ants have complex lives. What? That’s us? Yes. In this great debut book.”
- Thalia Field about A Fixed, Formal Arrangement
“In A Fixed, Formal Arrangement, Allison Carter relinquishes all negotiable capital, all legitimate emotions, all historical certainties. She is trending, instead, toward the hell-that-won’t-be-denied, itself a slippery slope of desire, a here that won’t congeal, the outside that won’t stay out. Identity is not premeditated – it’s worn incompletely and it never fits, nor stays in place. It has no history and no forecast. Carter’s work is a struggle to dream itself into consciousness: to reel disjointed narrative fragments back into the room, the garage, the dream (wherever) while allowing parts of the narrator herself, (whatever), to escape and fly free. There is a movement from the connectedness that demands unconsciousness-formed-of-fear toward an unattached freedom from fear, generously rational in its solid irrational roots.”
- Diane Ward about A Fixed, Formal Arrangement
“I was reminded of Woolf, of Stein, of Diane Williams. I jotted these names: Renee Gladman, Thalia Field, Pamela Lu. A tradition of women writing. Of experimental prose. Or maybe Ben Marcus, okay, or Robbe-Grillet. But. None of these references felt exactly right.”
- Danielle Dutton about A Fixed, Formal Arrangement
Read an excerpt here
