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Pamela Hobart Carter

Pamela Hobart Carter

Earth at Perihelion


Born in Rhode Island, Pamela Hobart Carter grew up in Montreal. When she returned to the US, she graduated from high school a second time, earned two geology degrees (Bryn Mawr College and Indiana University), and became a teacher. Over more than three decades, Carter taught a variety of ages and subjects, from science pedagogy for a teaching program to art for middle school. When classrooms closed for Covid, she added make-a-poem-at-home lessons to her website: playwrightpam.wordpress.com. These days, she periodically collects poems from preschoolers via their dictation.

Carter’s plays have been produced in Seattle (her home), Montreal, and Fort Worth. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net (3x). She is a 2023 Yavanika Press mixed-genre winner for Behind the Scenes at the Eternal Everyday, an e-chapbook of cut-ups, and a 2024 Yavanika Press mixed-genre winner for Only Connect, an e-chapbook of her ekphrastic poems in conversation with photographs by Londoner Robert M. L. Raynard. Some of her other publications include the poetry chapbooks Her Imaginary Museum (Kelsay Books) and Held Together with Tape and Glue (Finishing Line Press); twelve short books in easy-English for adults (written with Arleen Williams, No Talking Dogs Press); and dozens of poems and articles (in literary and teaching journals and in anthologies).

Carter is also a visual artist, gym climber, hiker, skier, and mother.

Learn more at https://playwrightpam.wordpress.com/


Earth at Perihelion: $17.99

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Excerpt from Earth at Perihelion

Starry Nights

Begin with night sky above sodium-lamp city—
Ursa Major, Orion, Cassiopeia,
Mars, Venus, Moon. You have seen
what the artist saw.

Between these, stars and planets
of her own invention drip off her paintbrush—
she loves the edge of science that touches chance,
and the painting was never to be a chart
for sailors.

Infer what spaceships find. Sketch
these horse heads and spiderwebs,
these tufted and tentacled bodies.

On watercolor paper, like fireworks,
wet drops of gold and green radiate.

A volcano in her imaginary galaxy erupts.
Lava spews bloody rocks
across a black expanse.

Now you have seen what the artist dreamed.
Now you dream. Now you see.

Earth at Perihelion