Poetry Reading by Peter Neil Carroll

Peter Neil Carroll, author of the brand-new poetry collection Something is Bound to Break, is currently Poetry Moderator for Portside.org and lives in Belmont, CA, with writer/photographer Jeannette Ferrary.

He has published over 20 books, including five previous collections of poetry: An Elegy for Lovers (Main Street Rag, 2017); The Truth Lies on Earth; Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land; A Child Turns Back to Wave: Poetry of Lost Places, which won the Prize Americana; and Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem.

His poetry has appeared in many journals, including Amsterdam Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, Verse Daily, Southern Humanities Review, Spillway, Plainsongs, and the North American Review.  He is author of the memoir, Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia & the Art of History.

There is no subject too large for Peter Carroll, a strong and unusual poet who writes with intelligence, with certainty, with wisdom, and with a strong and compelling voice. The poems in this collection are worth reading again and again. ~Esther Cohen, Breakfast with Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is hard. Consider the world we live in, consider these magnificent poems by Peter Neil Carroll. I admire his courage to tackle the intimate and the distant. I admire the way his poems hunger after words without being self-indulgent or over-the-top. His language is vivid and specific and sensory and intelligent. These are poems of beautiful precision, deep seeing and knowing, rhythm and music and song and singing. ~Joseph Zaccardi

Something’s Bound to Break, Peter Carroll’s most personal book to date, offers us a writer at the peak of his powers. In episodes from a long, eventful life he portrays the human condition in all its grandeur and folly. Childhood, romance, the phantasmagoric maze of New York City, everything that touches him becomes an opportunity for wisdom. Something’s Bound to Break will leave you laughing, enlightened and asking for more. ~Lee Rossi