Model Home, Jay’s second collection of poetry will soon be available. Here’s what respected authors are saying:
“As you visit Jay Hall Carpenter’s Model Home, be sure to savor the window dressings, the freshly painted walls, the pine-beamed attic and that deeply dug root cellar. Enjoy the rhyming sounds in the trees out back. Pay attention to the whispers inside the garage — the cobwebs and spills. Yes, his house of poems opens wide doors of yearning and wonder, hosts you and your memories with welcoming acceptance and with filled-full basins of understanding. Especially enjoy poems such as “Like Kids” or “Day Lilies” or “Open Book.” They are hallway mirrors that won’t let you walk by without a long, long look.”
– Hiram Larew, Undone
“From its opening pages Jay Hall Carpenter’s collection, Model Home, lives up to its ironic title. The poet blends Biblical allusions with modern sensibilities in such poems as “Loaves and Fishes,” in which Christ appears as a blissed-out hippie. The speaker’s assertion that “A lotta folks walked around/In a beard and sandals that summer” lends immediacy to the familiar story. Carpenter’s mastery of diction shows up again in “Job Search”: formal language is both fussy and funny in the mouth of a 21st-century grammarian. The poet’s attention to language shows up in sonnets, odes, and carefully observed portraits such as the clever “Would-be Robot,” an examination of the truism that we never turn out exactly as our parents wish. Model Home is a funny, frightening look at the physical and emotional wounds of our first families.”
– Laura Shovan, Takedown
“Jay Carpenter writes with an irreverence that can only come from having deep reverence for the things that make us most human—loves, losses, regrets, pain, joy, bodies used well and misused heartbreakingly. It’s not often that a few lines can make you laugh, ache, and then say, aloud, “Wow,” in a kind of awed and gutted way. Carpenter is a poet who knows that irreverence is the only way to approach the most holy things.”
-Faith Salie, Approval Junkie, Emmy winner