For Carolyn Dunn, the act of storytelling is an act of restoration. In her book, The Stains of Burden and Dumb Luck, she covers the cartography of memory. Asking which world is the real one, she forges ahead as if all worlds were real. Dunn often tells her stories in long and narrow lines down the margin of the page, giving her readers an amazing slide down the slippery hill of history and heritage.
—Diane Glancy, The Servitude of Love &
The Collector of Bodies: Concern for Syria and the Middle EastThese are precious bits of writing that shine like old style copper earrings and purple dyed hair, like offerings cut from mica then set out on a diner tabletop. Carolyn Dunn’s new book of poems, The Stains of Burden and Dumb Luck embraces the complexities that both cradle and muffle us. In the poem “World Renewal” Dunn asserts "I accept a new rough song, escaping from my lips” and I feel my own experiences resonate with the words. The poet illuminates a web of mutual responsibility, dispossession, forced experience and the occasional regret but with a strong and sure hand. The language is muscular, exists on many levels and reflects a world that many will recognize. This book is going to take its earned place on the bookshelf with other work I go to for self healing.
—Kim Shuck, author of Smuggling Cherokee, Deer Trails, and Exile Heart;
7th PoetLaureate of San Francisco
