Instant Winner

A moving, authentic exploration of spirituality and the domestic from a prize-winning poet

The wry, supple poems in Carrie Fountain’s second collection take the form of prayers and meditations chronicling the existential shifts brought on by parenthood, spiritual searching, and the profound, often beguiling experience of being a self, inside a body, with a soul. Fountain’s voice is at once deep and loose, enacting the dawning of spiritual insight, but without leaving the daily world, matching the feeling of the “pure holiness in motherhood” with the “thuds the giant dumpsters make behind the strip mall when they’re tossed back to the pavement by the trash truck.” In these wise, accessible, deeply emotional poems, she captures a contemporary longing for spiritual meaning that’s wary of prepackaged wisdom—a longing answered most fully by attending to the hustle and bustle of everyday life.Carrie Fountain was born and raised in Mesilla, New Mexico. Her debut collection, Burn Lake, was published by Penguin in 2010. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Agni, and Tin House. She lives with her family in Austin, Texas.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of these poems were first published in the following journals, to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made:

The American Poetry Review

Bat City Review

Better

Ecotone

The Harlequin

Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature

Iron Horse Literary Review

The Journal

Southwestern American Literature

The Texas Observer

Tin House

Tupelo Quarterly