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About the Author

Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, her MA TESOL from San Francisco State University, edited the small chapbook press, ypolita press, and is a member of Black Radish Books Publishing Collective. She has published 15 chapbooks, most recently . Her full-length books include The Incompossible (2011) and Orphan Machines (2015), and now Vibratory Milieu, from Nightboat Books. She lives in San Francisco where she teaches ESL.

Reviews

"As in her first collection, The Incompossible, Hunter effortlessly blends private dialogue with public testimony orchestrated in a variety of forms. Orphan Machines drones a bittersweet urban lyric, and by the end readers may also be asking themselves in public, 'Should / I fake normalcy or be real?'”—Jacket2
"This is a book of subtle curiosity, attentiveness, and carefully balanced juxtaposition. It re-enlivens a kind of attention to language and shows us possibility and resonant significance within the mundane.”—Full Stop
"Vibratory Milieu is a polyglot chorus where the lines reverberate in a sound cloud, and where we take in more than we might have thought we could handle. It vibrates, this cacophonous milieu. The title of this potent book makes a resonant promise that the work delivers on."—Colorado Review"This is a book with many entry-points, without a singular intended route. Turn to any random page and it will feel like you’re walking into another dimension. I enjoyed encountering it as if I was doing contact improv. My attention and comprehension had its ebbs and flows, but I enjoyed watching how the text blocks surged and retreated; I attended to moments of resonance and harmonized in the margins with my own citations and lived history."—Anomaly"Vibratory Milieu is a high-speed polyphonic lyric suite that somehow feels simultaneously an extension of her prior work, and yet, leagues ahead in terms of structure."—rob mclennan"Like the eponymous teen heroine of strategic reversals, Carrie White, Carrie Hunter wields awesome telekinetic powers. Collaged quotations and phrases hover on the page, spotlighting the objects of our desire, fury and incredulity. We find ourselves somewhere within 'boundaryless metamorphosis’s apparent borders,' a tensile and refractive echo chamber of mega consequence. With heightened awareness of the stimulations and fabrications at hand, we become emboldened to bring down the house (capitalism, racial, gendered and ecological violence, etc.), an imbricated architecture, every part, every function accumulative and inextricably linked. In Vibratory Milieu, feminist provocation tackles the garish and overarching humiliating features of the omnipresent succubus that wields so many guises. 'If true consciousness lies below the conscious level,' ease into the hypnotic genius of Carrie Hunter’s representation of encounter."—Brenda Iijima
"Vibratory Milieu casts a spell of ecstatic, esoteric associations, forming unexpected neural pathways with a language that reminds us, 'the book is still a technology.' Carrie Hunter’s maximalist collage form masterfully weaves together language and living, acting as an antidote to the static-apocalypse all around us, reminding its reader, 'Reality is music.' This vibrant text shakes the body of the reader into a dance of memory, language, and unknowing sublimation."—Angel Dominguez
"'Dreaming prepares you for clairvoyance,' Hunter writes, which in turn prepares us for clairvoyance in the various realms of consciousness. We are continually made to know we’re in a poem, and that we’re likewise in a dream, awake. Hunter creates this lucid dreamstate wherein the poem is written and we dwell there, a place where she has dwelt, where she has made a dwelling place for us. Where consciousness is a multifaceted gem to behold, to hold up as we look at it, turning it around. Aphoristic in form, but cohesive in poetic narrative, because the voice drawing together the source fragments is so magnetic. Ripped intelligence is the phrase that comes to mind, ripped like the way muscles are ripped, or the way a text is ripped off. Diamond-like, dovetailed, and then suddenly, your aura drops around your knee."—Julian Talamantez Brolaski