Richard Carr's Lucifer is the devil everybody knows. Mick the Bastard and Juliet are frighteningly familiar, too. Lyric reflections on wild, willful abandon, Carr's latest sequence limns a dark, doomed life with only a hint of the silver believers pray lines blue-black storm clouds when they loom overhead. — Brian Beatty, author of Duck! and host of You Are Hear
Lucifer is not a dark companion. He is the dark companion, a useless blanket keeping you only more wet in the rain—yet you won't take it off. It's a cloak, after all, an illusion of protection that sometimes we need, if only because it's so familiar. With Richard Carr's Lucifer, we peel the blanket off and see it for what it is—in Carr's case, brilliance. Dark, dangerously beautiful, savage in its salvation. — Paula J. Lambert, author of The Sudden Seduction of Gravity and The Guilt That Gathers
In Lucifer, Richard Carr achieves what both any good fiction writer and any good poet strive to. He draws us into a sharply defined world and makes us care about its inhabitants, doing so through language that is true to that world yet transcendent: "Juliet's shirt buttons are fragile, holy wafers. / I take one in my mouth, press it with my tongue tip, / pull the shirt taut like a white kite, / and let it go." Lucifer challenges us to love the unlovable and commit the unthinkable, all while it sings in our ears. — Darci Schummer, prize winning poet and fiction writer