christina carter-for want of walls book (unifactor)

christina carter: for want of walls

"There are no obvious pathways of understanding into or through Christina Carter's For Want of Walls, a catalog of the unknowable more than a book of any easy categorization. Carter has been an active agent in independent music and art since the early '90s, and much like her work in other mediums, her writing follows no predictable template and upends even standard expectations of non-linear structures. The words arrive in segments and at various velocities, quickly shifting perspectives between narrators and timelines, moving from fathoms beneath murky waters to above ground in an undone world. For Want of Walls follows several previous collections of Carter's writing, but is her first book to include visual art. Watercolor paintings act as inversions and co-representations of the written word delivered in a different language, a rough-cut juxtaposition of bold, cut-flower colors. These images map out diagrams of remembered rooms, the floor plans and furnishings of various childhood homes, and forgotten but still grasped presences, all recollected outside of time like a barely held together, yet somehow still vibrant, vaseless bouquet. As Carter's ever-unraveling fragments emerge there are moments of blood, glass, divinity, reflection. Unwonted displays of beauty and waves of warm, generous confusion require an open curiosity. For Want of Walls asks that the reader becomes porous to its efflorescent currents."--Fred Thomas