Richard Carr's brilliant fifth book, One Sleeve, collects all the resonating themes of his earlier work, turbocharges them, and demands that the reader, stripped of all pretense, illusion, and self-pity, face the human condition of our time. From these dark poems shine great beauty and a strange, tentative-yet-tough kindness, while simile and lyricism transform each poem into a mythology that is both frightening and comforting. ? Nancy White, author of Sun, Moon, Salt and Detour Carr's narrator picks scabs off his philosophical wounds while his alter ego, "One Sleeve," attempts to make sense of a fractured universe. "Irony is the new certainty," declares Carr's ambivalent speaker, caught between the physical sensations and philosophical problems of this world and the next. ? David Hulm, Kirkwood Community College, Iowa City The very first poem announces that Carr will not be playing by the rules. "He thinks of himself in the third person / except sometimes when he talks. // I talk between people. / I aim for the space between passersby." Breaking the rules allows the narrator to speak with/as a protean voice that makes him always multiple, inciting us-we passersby-into remaining, like One Sleeve, "awake, counting beams of snowlight / hovering in the slats of the blinds." ? H. L. Hix, author of First Fire, Then Birds