Comme se tressent leurs rapides eaux

Many thanks to @ilcontephotography for allowing us to use his wonderful photograph for the cover. I couldn't have dreamed of a better or more fitting artwork for this poetry collection!

You can get it as a physical book or a digital one:

to purchase the physical copy, head over to amazon (my editor is specialized in digital and print on demand publishing);

to purchase the digital (epub) copy, go directly to the editor's website.

And finally... (transcript in image description)

🫵 i am not asking. Buy Carmine’s book of poetry

gallup, n. mex. may 2026

Art Deco bookends featuring Medieval ladies reading. 1920

so they were trying to figure out if children use syntactic knowledge to learn new vocabulary, specifically in this case they were researching two year olds. with verbs, some are done to a person ("x hit y") and some only have a doer ("x laughed"), and they wanted to see if these different sentence structures had an effect on how toddlers learn.

they got some grad students, put one in a rabbit costume and one in a duck costume. they had the rabbit repeatedly push the duck into a crouching position using their left hand. at the same time, both the rabbit and the duck were moving their right hands in a repetitive circling motion. they had a bunch of two years olds watch this. with half of the kids, they said "the rabbit is gorping the duck!" and with the other half, they said "the rabbit and duck are gorping!" afterwards, they showed two videos at the same time to the kids, one with the rabbit pushing the duck down but no circling motion, and one with both making the circling motion but no pushing. then they said "where's gorping now? find gorping!" and the kids who had heard the first statement would consistently look towards the video of the pushing motion, while the kids who heard the second statement would consistently look towards the video of the circling motion.

Q: Do you have a favorite ghost story?

A: My favorite ghost story was one told to me by a woman who commissioned me to make a piece about her sister (’Tethered to my Heart’). This woman was an identical twin, and very close to her sister. They often spoke and texted each other twenty times a day. Her husband was an identical twin as well, and his identical twin married her identical twin.

When she approached me, her twin sister had just died, six months before. She told me that when her sister died, she too wanted to die. Life seemed to lose all meaning and substance. Often it seemed there was no point in continuing on. She and her husband decided to purchase a vacation home in New Hampshire. After they unpacked the moving vans, her husband drove back to the city for work, leaving her behind in the new house. The electricity had not yet been turned on, and as the evening progressed, the house became dark. She lay on the bed upstairs in the dark room. She was wondering how long it would take, if she just stopped eating all together. As she lay there, she became aware that she heard footsteps downstairs in the house. At first she was scared – she reasoned that people had seen the moving vans and the dark house, and had decided to rob the place.

“Good,” she thought to herself, “I hope they kill me while they are at it.” She listened as the footsteps crossed the floor beneath her room, and then as the footsteps climbed the stairs. Then the doorknob to her room twisted and the door opened. She lay curled on the bed in a fetal position, and listened as the footsteps approached the bed. Then, she smelled her sister’s perfume. Her sister climbed into the bed behind her, and curled herself around her, spooning her the way she often had when comforting her as a child. Her sister’s presence was utterly tangible and solid. She opened her eyes, and the room was filled with a blinding white light, like klieg lights were on. Gradually the presence of her sister faded, until there was only the slight pressure of her hand on her shoulder. After that, her depression eased, and she was able to go on.