Carter, Allison: Here Versus Elsewhere

Insert Press, paperback

Publication Date: August 26, 2014

Publisher Marketing: 

“Human echolocation is an ability of humans to detect objects in their environment by sensing echoes from those objects. Deploying complex language—polyrhythmic, repetitive, reverberant, resounding—with an eerie proficiency, Allison Carter’s writing performs a kind of linguistic human echolocation that articulates, navigates, and wayfinds space—physical, relational, emotional, and otherwise…—all within a network of deceptively familiar frames. In her new book, Here Versus Elsewhere, it is the accumulation of emptinesses, expertly and intentionally drawn, that definitively interprets the boundaries of the spaces the reader occupies as well as the nature of the entities, human and otherwise, that serve as persistent companions within those selfsame spaces.” —Harold Abramowitz

Here Versus Elsewhere

N.B. Ghosts are cameras photographing a smaller space, then a bigger space around it. The space has people in it. I, like you, am crazy about ghosts, just as they are about us.

Their movements can be sudden and empathetic, with incision of nail, through a space, above or below, holding a hand, you suddenly discover a sandy interior, moving through a sensory deprivation experience, I took your hand and felt it slip from the room, when, if ever, do I get to – does anyone get to - proceed?

They can be left, right. By yourself or lonely. On the road or through the meadow. With internal logic, as a cat.

I turned my back just once to the empty space in my bedroom and now I have a ghost named Christopher.