Measures of Weather

Measures of Weather is about more than just weather. What isn't weather? Weather here is a stand-in, for the elemental, the transitional, the ungovern-able. And what does it mean to measure? To find intersections. To articulate complex subject positions. To use language to make tangible changes in the material world. To call attention to the invisible in all its myriad of forms, from the minuscule to the gigantic. To articulate the inchoate, to give shape to the ineffable, the transient, and the impossible. Carpenter uses language as a medium to grapple with organisational structures and their failings, to think beyond the scale of the human body, to engage with a tangle of vast systems-of air, of glass, of wind, of west. "Shifting between scales, from the celestial to the microscopic, J. R. Carpenter's Measures of Weather excites the ear with its deft handling of blazing innovative language and its exhilarating music. This exquisite collection thrives under poetic constraint." -Alycia Pirmohamed "Measures of Weather articulates a new form of poetic working with histori-cal material. This articulation raises questions about how European culture has historically perceived natural phenomenon-how we have constructed imaginative and often erroneous ideas about how nature operates, and how we have seen nature as an economic tool or a means towards colonial expansion. The poems' interplay between fragmentary, lyrical rhythms and historical sources achieve a striking musicality and demonstrate a finely-tuned sense of political and poetic intelligence." -Peter Jaeger "In J. R. Carpenter's latest collection we find an elemental fugue of poly-directional longing, a vibrational living archive, a weathering syntax. Lines form spindles of listening and observing, offering language as a measure of intimacy, environment, and history. By measure we might mean a kind of ascertaining, an assessing, a travelling over, a unit of expression, a rhythm, a course of action. Tightly attuned to the sonic valence of lyric, our speaker turns their poetic apostrophe to the pleasures and dangers of grouping and enumeration. The effect is at once controlled and cascading. In these poems we time travel, we ache from the effort, we speculate, sing, and surrender. Measures of Weather is sensuous and expansive, lamenting, and intricate. A poetic enquiry attuned to the forces of violence, place, embodiment, scale, and orientation. A craftwork of altering energies and propositional forms conducted by desire and sky." -Maria Sledmere