Mackenzie Carignan currently lives and writes in the Rocky Mountains of Denver, Colorado. She has a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an MA in Creative Writing from University of Colorado in Boulder, and a BA in Literature and Creative Writing from University of Tampa. Her chapbooks include Metaphors for Miscarriage, The Listening Lost, and &persona among others. a house without a roof is open to the stars is her first full-length collection.
Praise for a house without a roof is open to the stars
In a house without a roof is open to the stars, Mackenzie Carignan’s poems make their way into the reader’s consciousness by way of scrupulous perception. Carignan’s acuity creates a vision of the world that the reader trusts even as it proves itself strange, eccentric. “Spectacle and skeptical,” she writes, “they both come from a speck/a fleck/a flicker a sliver/of what we see.” Carignan holds the tension of perception and skepticism aloft keen intelligence. Intellect is augmented, however, by a depth of feeling that makes this book a project of consummate commitment and care. The world, fostered with such tenderness, resists fragmentation: “It seems like disassembly/but it is finally alignment.”—Elizabeth Robinson
In a house without a roof is open to the stars, Carignan’s star-spangled images and sentences “spur and flower into cunning disruptions.” Syntactical shrapnel penetrates her deceptively tidy assembly of language dioramas, which “scrape through you like a bizarre scissor,” while housing black pumpkins, blue lips, women who eat their own placentas, and a brother eaten by fire. Myth, desire, textuality, and wreckage underpin this dazzling debut as Carignan constructs a dizzying carousel of sorrow, singing, drowning, and longing. With exquisite skill, she transforms “out of ice, origami” and out of loss, this conjuring of brilliant poems. —Simone Muench
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