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In lyrical, kaleidoscopic prose, poet Emily Carlson excavates and examines the divergent narratives families tell about the stories that define them. Masterfully weaving narrative and art theory, metaphysics, and memory, Majestic Cut is part-memoir, part-meditation on meaning-making and the slippery nature of time. At once a philosophical inquiry and an unflinching portrait of a family confronting trauma and its aftermath, this book is an inventive and searing reckoning with the limits of monolithic truth in the stories we tell ourselves—and each other.

Thomas Page McBee

What are we to do when what we are most certain about dwells next to our greatest doubts? What kinds of stories can we tell when we let go of monsters and heroes? What happens to our impermissible emotions once we have “put them out, like a dog in the rain?” In Majestic Cut, our primary guide is the speaker of these poems, a rigorous and brave thinker. Emily Carlson also offers us another companion through these questions—the artist Gordon Matta-Clarke, who made his own majestic cuts through abandoned buildings. Matta-Clarke’s art helps these poems make a new space where something beyond freezing or fleeing is possible.

Sarah Marxer

In this lyrical near-memoir, Emily Carlson lifts snatches of her story through turbid water toward the light, as her mother’s voice hangs over her shoulder, editing each moment into doubt. In Carlson’s hands, the chronicle of a mother’s abusive relationship and a daughter’s urgent desire to rescue her fracture into celestial debris, a constellation of questions both mundane and metaphysical. In searching, delicate prose, Carlson cuts her house in half and holds it to her keen mind’s eye, examining all its torn and worn parts, its misalignments, its contradictions—with tenderness, unyielding grace, and an unblinking gaze.

Camille Rankine

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