In No Hurry

Michael Carrino's collection In No Hurry echoes Italo Calvino's dictum that good writing "hurries slowly." These poems pause to consider, relish, and articulate historical and personal moments before they pass. The center of Carrino's poems is an off-beat mystery and solitude - 'a quiet stillness' and sometimes quiet horror - whether about the found grace after the nuclear bombing of Japan or the silence of Greenwich Village during the pandemic. His poems hold fragile moments against the swift current of time. Carrino's poems mediate on experience; imagine other lives, the passing of seasons, landscape, light, lost birds, or simply express the stillness of a lived life while savoring white tea on a moonlit night. The poems escape preciousness; the language is direct and his humour wry. They hold the moment and balance perception like a good photograph.

-Carmelo Militano, author of Catching Desire and Morning After You

In one of these poems, the speaker stands before a painting titled The Field of All Possibility, below whose quiet surface an image seems just about to rise, and it holds the speaker in long contemplation despite the bustle of other viewers around him. Carrino offers the reader a similar experience - moments of reverie that hold fragments of past or imagined events, and small still-lives captured briefly, gracefully, as though with a calligraphic brush. Clearly this work has provided its author, and now us, with some stay against "the inevitable commotion" to which we have become all too accustomed.

-Leslie Ullman, author of The You That All Along Has Housed You and Library of Small Happiness
Michael Carrino's collection In No Hurry echoes Italo Calvino's dictum that good writing "hurries slowly." These poems pause to consider, relish, and articulate historical and personal moments before they pass. The center of Carrino's poems is an off-beat mystery and solitude - 'a quiet stillness' and sometimes quiet horror - whether about the found grace after the nuclear bombing of Japan or the silence of Greenwich Village during the pandemic. His poems hold fragile moments against the swift current of time. Carrino's poems mediate on experience; imagine other lives, the passing of seasons, landscape, light, lost birds, or simply express the stillness of a lived life while savoring white tea on a moonlit night. The poems escape preciousness; the language is direct and his humour wry. They hold the moment and balance perception like a good photograph.

-Carmelo Militano, author of Catching Desire and Morning After You

In one of these poems, the speaker stands before a painting titled The Field of All Possibility, below whose quiet surface an image seems just about to rise, and it holds the speaker in long contemplation despite the bustle of other viewers around him. Carrino offers the reader a similar experience - moments of reverie that hold fragments of past or imagined events, and small still-lives captured briefly, gracefully, as though with a calligraphic brush. Clearly this work has provided its author, and now us, with some stay against "the inevitable commotion" to which we have become all too accustomed.

-Leslie Ullman, author of The You That All Along Has Housed You and Library of Small Happiness