Call and Response

Sparse lineation and sly humor are prevalent in Call and Response, but the navigation of loss is at the center of this collection. Ever the myth maker, Carney blends vulnerable humanism and Robinson Jeffers-like naturalism with the honestly inquisitive sensibilities of Neruda’s Book of Questions. The result is a funny, sad, and subtly powerful book that I’ll return to often.  
—Nano Taggart

Rob Carney is tuned to some amazing frequency—it comes from 500 North and Morton, it comes from beyond, it comes from when we were wooded slopes—but he listens and returns with these poems, thrumming with “lifeblood,” these songs which throw down and call out (see “Poetic Justice”), which are often rich with praise but never falsify. Sure, one might want to “lovetalk” nature but nature will always kick our ass. It’s always there, underneath us, “with teeth.” I find this book both serious and joyful. Call and Response is such a good journey. 
—Kate Northrop

Rob Carney’s Call and Response reads like a book of testaments. In poem after poem, with memory shouldered like “a broken moon,” Carney dares to imagine a generous and habitable world where even rivers have rights and animosities toward refugees have ceased from natives who don’t “zero them out”—a world where movement is inevitable, change is welcome, and the pursuit of justice and empathy isn’t naive and futile, but urgent, clear-eyed, and worthwhile.    
—Abayomi Animashaun