Poetry like none you've ever seen!

CUMBERLAND, Maine - June 16, 2016 - PRLog -- The Congress of Human Oddities by Teresa Carson

"Teresa Carson's verse enters the bloodstream and resonates with complex insights, a passionate empathy, and relentless investigation of motives of the human heart."

"A true imaginative feat, this book carries the reader into a world of grotesqueries that resist any easy dismissal."

Sixty pages of poems, an introduction, and end notes, key the reader into the voices of these characters. You can only imagine what they might look like, with the help of a few period cover illustrations, in true nineteenth century romantic mystery, their words are the wavelength that transmute an existence, further perhaps an exercise in grasping the complexities of the Civil War era.

If you like theater dialogue then this book will entice your interest for language, dialect, and human condition.

From the back cover:

The Congress of Human Oddities presents yet another engrossing aspect of the American Civil War era. Welcome to the world of the traveling itinerant exhibition in which deformed, or unusual human "oddities" were put on public display. We are presented with the irony of yet another type of enslaved destiny and experience:  those who live confined to the margins of the social community because of fear, ignorance, and prejudice, while they are simultaneously exploited by public fascination and repulsion. Herein is an intricate narrative of interconnected character monologues in verse.

As the Civil War is waged in the distance, the Oddities endure brutal avarice, keen lust, corrosive jealousies, and complexly layered yearnings all mixed with sly humor, wrenching heartache and dogged resilience despite cruel destinies and broken dreams. Each poem exists as an individual voice while contributing to the overall chronicle of murder, suicide, accidental death, adultery, evangelism, androgyny, and a most unusual pair of slaves who flee to freedom.

Fascinating personas speak through a poetic sensibility that grips one's attention from first page to last. Teresa Carson's verse enters the bloodstream and resonates with complex insights, a passionate empathy, and relentless investigation of motives of the human heart.

-Cassandra Medley, Professor of Playwriting, Sarah Lawrence College

Teresa Carson has created a remarkable gloss on the adage that a sucker is born every minute. Her poems, inspired by, among other things, the Shakespearean wellhead that nineteenth century America adored, cover a dazzling range of foibles, faiths, and sheer cash-driven cynicism. She goes deeper, however, into the various mysteries of the heart that defy what a first look recoils from or mocks. A true imaginative feat, this book carries the reader into a world of grotesqueries that resist any easy dismissal. What is now routinely televised in myriad versions was once shown in tents on a summer's evening. Part of Teresa Carson's insight is to make the reader feel how little has changed, how our gawking is endless.

-Baron Wormser

Purchase the book here: http://www.deerbrookeditions.com/?page_id=613

Teresa Carson holds an MFA in Poetry and an MFA in Theatre, both from Sarah Lawrence College. She is associate publisher at CavanKerry Press and the assistant director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. She is the author of two collections of poetry-Elegy for the Floater (CavanKerry Press 2008) and My Crooked House (CavanKerry Press 2014).