Carol Krause's ​A Bouquet of Glass

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Guernica Editions, 2025)

When I started reading Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds, I had to stop almost immediately. It was so goddamn good. Same thing happened with Lisa Moore's Open. Now it's happening to me again with A Bouquet of Glass.  Something about the wonder in these prose poems. They resonate. Awe and a sense of recognition still my brain and my body. I feel reverence for this poet’s ability to articulate the dark and light of an uncontained mind.
 
The author asks that reviewers read the acknowledgements section because it provides important context for the book, so I begin there: “A Bouquet of Glass is a bouquet of hands. I have been cared for by so many.” I know this feeling.  During my near-death health crisis in 2009, many friends reached out and supported both me and my husband and I will be forever grateful to them.
 
The word tender is repeated often. And light.  Care, radical compassion and beauty in sensitivity are noted. I read the acknowledgements for clues of what is to come: the underworld, doctors, muddy adventures, mysterious singing and “caves that hold the earth's secrets. You have taught me how to move within hidden places with an exposed heart.”
 
The book contains thirty-three chapters. I think randomly of records on a turntable and thirty-three-and-a-third minutes on a long-playing album. I love the music in this collection: I see revolutions of light, and I hear the melody of this book.
 
I read the dedication: “to people who are further on the other side of the glass than me.” During my health crisis, I experienced ICU psychosis, a temporary state of confusion and disorientation that involved hallucinations and delusions.  I believed my hallucinations and delusions were reality, no I knew it. In all of them, I was on the other side: of windows, of gauze curtains in a basement, of yellow and blue curtains in hospital rooms, of being heard or seen. This dedication made me shiver in recognition, fellow feeling. And then at the start of the book before CHAPTER ONE, Krause writes: “Everything in this book is real, but not all of it actually happened. How does an altered mind speak? I gather each poem into a bouquet of glass.” I appreciate Krause’s ability and willingness to articulate the ways in which an altered mind speaks. I also embody through personal experience the juxtaposition that is throughout the book: the real vs what actually happened.
 
I remember the disorientation I experienced and the confusion of my altered state, of not knowing what I was experiencing wasn’t “reality.” Of everything being out of time. I am glad Krause includes dates at the start of each poem. I appreciate the context of the dates, which range from September 2019 to March 2020 and then one poem in January 2021. The work is not in chronological order but jumps forward and backward in time. Some poems are assigned to the same date. This makes sense to me. When I was in my altered state, I flashed in and out of time and this contributed to the disoriented feeling I was experiencing.
 
I understand too that what Krause describes is not the same as what I went through, but I still feel a sense of recognition.
 
I relate to the constant feeling of disorientation in this book: “The rest is a blur of sun and air”; “I found myself in another place.” But I am most relieved to see the calm acceptance of it, when that acceptance happens, and the role of nature in bringing harmony and relief from pain.
 
I want to revisit Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept because I have a vague feeling that the rhythm of the sentences is similar in its sense of urgency and the rawness of the emotions.  
 
I am compelled too by the speaker’s need to escape from bright lights and noises, feeling trapped. So much estrangement. Feelings of not belonging to the world. Over and over the refrain: I don't belong here.
 
The overwhelm reminds me of Concetta Principe's Disorder. In her poem “Running from the Sunshine of My Life,” Principe describes the sun as having “radiant decibels” and screaming ‘so effing loud/my head aches.” Here, Krause writes “I'm rattling off a fierce overdose of sound and my face is a stuffed trumpet in the wrong orchestra.”

Listen, I have so many dogears and underlined passages in this book:

One glimpse and I'm hovering between rapture and terror. They call this an altered state, but maybe it's just too clarified. And maybe it's hard to take a hit of reality when looking out from wounded eyes.

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I am split apart in pieces every time a seed cracks through swollen ground—her broken offering a sweet bullet for the soul.

​There are many images of the speaker being split open or split apart throughout the book, and within is something wondrous, shining and unexpected. This book will break you open and reveal something hidden and glistening:

This water has a journey same as I. I cannot travel with the water. I do not fit inside the pipes. I call the water me and I die in sips.

I am embarrassed because I want to quote the whole book to you, to read it aloud and make you sit and listen without moving. This is a book of intense feeling.
 
The overwhelm also comes from the rhythm of the sentences and their accumulation. Often an alteration of short, staccato subject-verb arrangements or fragments.  It is difficult to read it all in one sitting because there’s so much here. On the other hand, I want to devour it all at once because I am so drawn in to the urgency of the speaker’s experiences, through the book’s images, the language, the longing and the intensity: “let’s sit together with our one empty candle and melt our eyes into the flame.”
 
This is a book of darkness, worry, fear of death and ageing, melancholia, anxiety and voices, but it is also a book of calm, comfort, perseverance, wisdom, joy and light: “this life is a single movement in a long dance. so i contend with the evidence of time and unfurl my fingers. like i have done a thousand times before.”
 
In Where Things Touch, A Meditation on Beauty, Bahar Orang writes, “By beauty, then, I mean slippage, I mean untetherment; I mean letting go, letting go of certainty, of expectation.”  In A Bouquet of Glass, Krause writes, “beauty is resting in chaos without fidgeting. beauty is pulling every bead off your bracelet. and wearing the string anyway. beauty is offering every bead to a stranger. dropping every pierced circle into her palm. feeling no less whole.” I see both portrayals of beauty as a type of letting go and of being ok to rest in uncertainty. Keats wrote to Shakespeare that a great thinker is capable of being in uncertainties and dubbed it “negative capability.” It’s been a praiseworthy attribute of poets ever since. Here it is the same. “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty” writes Keats in “Ode to A Grecian Urn.” A Bouquet of Glass overflows with the beauty of truth.
 
“I am told I am disordered, and that just means people can't keep up with me. And I can't keep up with people,” Krause writes in “I Imagine Myself Pregnant.” Her revelations and striving toward an understanding of self in this book make so much sense to me. She writes, “I bet there are a thousand books we could cuddle around and read. And they would be magical, I’m sure of it. Laced with trouble like me.” Yes! More dogears and underlines here, and reading the book aloud to my husband again.
 
In “Anything You Want Out of Life,” Krause writes:

​I want to come alive.
That's why I write poetry.
And crawl through mud in the darkness.

Krause describes an ultra-sensitivity with the world and surroundings, and I think of how poets pay close attention to both inner and outer worlds. The speaker tries to explain what she experiences to someone when she sees a squirrel in “Hazards of a Divergent Brain”: “Sometimes when the squirrel scrounged for food, I could taste the acorn in her mouth…” The person she is speaking to replies, “that sounds exhausting. Wouldn't you rather be me?” The speaker doesn't reply but my own answer is no.
 
There are practical details here, mentions of what one is supposed to master as an adult. In “Authorizing My Father to Assist With My Finances,” Krause writes: “I have other talents. Like slipping secrets from the moon and dropping into the underbelly of the human mind”; “I collect things—shiny things that have been forgotten. I gather them in my trembling hands and offer up a bouquet of glass.”
 
I can't help nodding in recognition once again. I value Krause's offerings deeply. Why don't we value such perspectives more in society? Why must we have to navigate this “capitalist maze”?
 
Krause shares all of her experiences with candour, including having to take an anti-psychotic medication because “the world is a jagged knife slicing through bone. I am bleeding everywhere.  But you do not notice…I cannot continue on like this…” The new medication helps. In “It Does Not Seize Me by the Throat,” she writes, “The world no longer pounces. It invites. I feel it throb in my pulse, but it does not throw me against the wall. I feel everything but everything does not own me.”
 
But as time continues, the speaker isn’t always accepting of taking her medications. In “A Higher Dose,” Krause describes the drug as “a flat drug A numb drug. An only-half-alive drug. The paranoia sits in the center of the drug. I cannot touch it.” In “Push Carol Back Inside,” the speaker feels like an imposter or feels nothing: “She is smaller, more subdued.” How many people feel this sense of strangeness in themselves, often under the effects of the medications they are taking?
 
“after the new drug left me (and the old drug rose in me), i started to feel like a goddess again,’ Krause writes in “human” and in “The Friendly Anti-Psychotic”: “I feel five claws of the friendly anti-psychotic clamp down my skull. Then I feel the pill moving inside my brain. Sometimes it strokes and hushes, but mostly it constrains. It straightens out my poems.”
 
In “Dilemma of a Crazy Artist,” Krause writes of Stable One vs Stable Two and the effect on the poems: “Why not add a few place mats and welcome the full range of the crazy artist? You might just find it's the quiet one that is secretly sleeping with the muse.”
 
The poet in me responds to Krause: “When the stranger asks me how I can sit so long alone in the dark, I know they aren’t a poet.” “The World Is Not Welcome In My Bedroom?” and, in “i begin the day with letters,” “i string them together. and i tie a knot at the end. this is what it means to be a poet. pulling and tying."
 
I, too, resist attempts at making my world monochrome: “They call it the Monochrome Enhancer. It's designed to make your world look as unremarkable as possible. [...] I know there are many of us, the meaning makers. I watch the colours slowly fade to ash.” Throughout the book, the speaker tries to accept the monochrome world, and it is anguishing to see.
 
The speaker's interactions with the medical community also form part of this book in such poems as “A Routine Mental Health Check Up.” Krause's description of the doctor's questions versus the speaker’s experience of noting the circles that she sees and the quarrelling bees “sabotaging the circuitry,” along with the way the doctor draws conclusions based on the speaker’s dreams, feels nerve-wracking to me. Krause communicates very effectively the tension here. When the speaker reveals her terror at “the feeling of being surrounded by flames,” the doctor replies “good, good.” When the doctor is paying careful attention to the speaker’s description of feeling helpless, the speaker "smiles mischievously” and adds a detail that resolves her dream safely, which seems to have the desired effect from the doctor: “It appears you are still in touch.  I am so glad you are doing well, Carol.”
 
There are many points in the book where the speaker reminds herself to act in socially acceptable ways. In “Don't Stare at the Spiders,” Krause writes “It's best not to talk to yourself or talk to strangers. Don't sing along with your music, unless you can do it ironically. Do not watch the spiders. And do not talk to the monster.”
 
Krause also reflects ableist attitudes to disability in poems such as “The Hat I Didn't Wear into the Disability Office”: “She smiles; not the you're-a-person-with-a-disability smile, but the you're-a-person-too smile.”  In “the end of the world,” Krause muses about what will happen to people with disabilities who depend on the system to function.
 
In “Echoes” Krause writes, “I feel the echoes of a life I never had.” She imagines a wife and a paycheque, a good life where no one calls her “broken or asks questions about the label at the end of my name.” She sees this life from the other side of the glass and sometimes hungers for it:

She asks how I do it, it looks so very hard. I tell her. It is.

I think many people may recognize themselves and loved ones in Krause's articulations of her life, both the struggles and the surprising joys. In my own writings, I always strive to write so that kindreds do not feel alone. I think Krause accomplishes this beautifully with A Bouquet of Glass. This is an important book that reflects lived experience with mental health and social assistance that is seldom talked about. I am not sure why society others those dealing with such issues and sees such discussions as taboo. I feel only recognition, wonder and understanding when I read Krause's words. And I believe many readers will find comfort and recognition in the work…and hope and joy. and being able to live with uncertainty: “love does not take. or make better. i do not know,  i wanted to say. but even that was a lie.” (“an old coat”)

​In “A Few Requests From the Other Side of the Window”: 

All we ask is that you do your part. What's that? Remember to smile. And when you weep, don't hold back. Breathe deeply and fully, and taste winter in your lungs. Stare at trees. And feel the spaces between your toes. Love often, and unnecessarily. Say things that might get you into trouble. Then revel in the trouble you have caused. Is that it?
 
Yup. We don't ask much. Oh, there is one more thing. What's that?
 
Be yourself.

​I could rabbit on more.  I love “The No-Idea Creature” and “The Creature Underneath”: they are teaching me to live in uncertainty. I love “a spiritual warrior” and all the poems that address the struggle “to manage the day without rupture.” A Bouquet of Glass is a collection of poems that doesn't flinch from showing vulnerability. I appreciate the anarchy in Krause's work, the hacking through concrete to release the natural world in “They Called Us the Hackers.” I love the speaker's struggle to meet societal expectations but also to defy them, the juxtapositions of tumult and peace. In “The World Is Ending” Krause writes, “I will hand out oranges and maybe even a harmonica. I have collected some fragments of comfort.” I will take the comfort, an orange and the harmonica and enjoy the melody of her poems, her voice that keeps singing despite the fear.

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Amanda Earl (she/her) writes, edits, reviews and publishes poetry, prose, hybrid work and visual poetry from the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples (colonially known as Ottawa). Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a long-poem collection about her near-death health crisis. Sign up to her Substack: Amanda Thru the Looking Glass to read quotes of the week, recipes, rants and musings and to get early access to Creatively Yours, her 2026 collaborative offerings with Charles Earl. Visit AmandaEarl.com for information on publications, honours and forthcoming readings.