Underkind, by Tess Carroll

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Underkind is a poetry collection documenting childhood as a form of prehistory—an era remote from rhythmic, standardized time, but nonetheless embedded in the present. These poems depict a period of articulate fidgets in which meaning is urgently assembled from the raw materials at hand. Letters and numbers have not yet settled in the mind as symbols; each unit of language is encountered as a novel object with texture and weight. Several of these poems imagine a feral, unsupervised kindergarten in which kids teach themselves. They conduct experiments, building and dismantling understanding as one would a volatile contraption.

As the speaker of Underkind matures, she both persists as an agent of play and is made its object. Manhandled and rummaging, collecting bruises in curious shapes, she remains a defiant, wholehearted rememberer. Carroll writes from the position of an adult who stays loyal to a kid self.

Tess Carroll is a poet and high school English teacher based in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gone Lawn, Mudfish and Fish Barrel Review. With Kyra Spence, she is the co-creator of the radio show RUMMAGE WORLD.