Foreword by Alan Shapiro
(Judge of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, 2008)

80 pp,  ISBN: 978-1904130-38-3, £8.99 (paperback only),  
Publication, November 7th 2009

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A note about After the Revival Equal parts church hymnal and outlaw country album, Carrie Jerrell’s After the Revival exudes a reverence for all things run down and wrecked. From abandoned coal mines to overgrown cemeteries, to rivers full of leeches; from tornados to demolition derbies, to weddings gone wrong, the places and events explored in this dazzling debut collection give rise to playful, poignant meditations on the shifty limits of language, memory, faith, and love. Employing free verse as well as traditional verse forms, After the Revival is full-throated, full-throttle poetry as technically nimble as it is unflinchingly voiced. It invites readers to celebrate the sacred, the secular, and the intersection of the two, and to sing “as if we weren’t trapped on cinder blocks, but free". he judge’s foreword

A note on Carrie Jerrell Carrie Jerrell was born in Petersburg, Indiana, USA in 1976. She received her MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and her PhD from Texas Tech University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is an assistant professor of English at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky and serves as the poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

Praise for After the Revival “Carrie Jerrell is a poised, mature and brilliant poet. Her distinctive genius, what makes her unlike anybody else I know, is her ability to bring together such a heterogeneous mix of worlds and influences – to be open to everything formal and informal, profane and sacred, foreign and home grown.” – from judge Alan Shapiro's foreword “The poems in this book are full of idiosyncratic wit, keen social intelligence and a kind of sass that makes great use of both the honey and the sting. That’s pleasure enough to encounter, but add to this Jerrell’s enviable formal assuredness and you have a book that announces a bright new voice to contemporary American poetry.” – Erin Belieu “After the Revival is a book of rich, tightly-packed poems suffused with the grit, rueful humor and pain of American country music.” – Dorianne Laux "After the Revival carefully mourns the vulnerability of rural America, from its people and their ways, to its small towns, to the land itself. There’s a bell of desperation quietly ringing throughout this original and finely-observed book. Carrie Jerrell’s poems are loaded with longing and anguish; they hit the page as homemade creations, gritty systems of memory and transformation, rough-hewn and vital." – Maurice Manning “Carrie Jerrell’s poems are as lyrically alive, intelligent, and unforgettable as Hank Williams’s best songs. A lover of paradox like John Donne, and as formally sophisticated, she moves between the divine and the profane in the blink of an eye. You can’t match this book for mature feeling and its rare, hopeful, sorrowing intelligence.” – Tom Sleigh

Reviews of After the Revival Acumen, 67, May 2010 "[I]mmediately exciting reading, poetry in an utterly distinctive voice ... These poems are full of unease and energy, of humour and formal grace, anguish and allusion ... She handles traditional forms splendidly – deserves a place in any modern anthology of the sonnet, and she writes a mean sestina too; she registers a particular kind of American speech without being false either to it or to the forms she uses ... Her poetic voice is 'all invitation' in its receptiveness but the poetry she makes out of her 'open' voice is tightly disciplined ... Assured, accomplished, zestful, wry – this is an impressive and attractive collection." – Glyn Pursglove

From After the Revival Nocturne for Matthew Twenty-two, come from the underground, you're through with the mine's night shift and wear coal dust like vernix while playing Clair de Lune. Moths crowd the porch-lit screen door, and you've come to trust your ear for every chord. Dark note by note, how many hours you've searched for songs that burn like lustrous rock – your damp neck creased with soot, your hands unclean – only to be spurned by stars repeating, Time, Time, Time. My only brother, in the pitch of sleep, may hymns resolve for you. May your dreams be more than ash. May you climb to a house of light and blind yourself at its windows, breathe its music in, and beat your wings like prayers against the mesh.       The Country-Western Singer's Ex-Wife, Sober in Mendocino County, California Somewhere back East my late love's all coked up, another cowgirl wannabe lying at his feet while he plucks a Willie Nelson song from his beer-soaked six string and complains nobody understands a rebel's broken heart. I've played her part, the star struck blonde in boots and denim mini, pert boobs, and brains to boot. Whiskey fed, dreamy, how I talked him up, a sequined Tammy to his George, my heart a backstage bed I wanted him to lie in. It proved too hard, and when a harder body came along, he said, The party's over, and left me listening to "Sad Songs and Waltzes," Waylon, steel guitars that struck like a boot to the face. But that's good country, right? A body enamored with its bruises, praising its screw-ups, the blood still wet in its wounds? Memory lies as still as a rattlesnake until my heart comes begging for its venom. Sink 'em in, my heart says. I've been traveling on a horse called Music, and he's brought me here to die. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to fill my ex's boots with spit the night I caught him with that up- start starlet at the bar; when everybody tried to hide in their shot glasses; when nobody but a Broadway street preacher had the heart to hold my hair off my face while I threw up outside; when all the songs I loved – "Crazy," "Golden Ring," "Jolene" – became like boots too busted to put on, bent-pitch ballads of his lies, my shame sung loud in the key of C. He's lying from the stage, in the bar or bed, when he says nobody understands him. I do. I've burned my boots, moved west to wine and water because his heart was a dry bottle, cold as the black rose rotting in his lapel, and I still wake up to his tunes: the beer, blow, boots and love, the lies they tell and don't. Once, I was a good-hearted woman. Now I pray, Lord, please, somebody, shut him up. ©