Within The Space Between
Stacy Cartledge
ISBN 978-1-933132-51-8 $16.00 82 pages
Stacy Cartledge brings a new voice to American poetry that is at once lyrical and erudite. These poems explore the space between passion and physics, singing of the textures of geometry and the mathematics of love. In one section, Cartledge describes the “vectors of motion” in a relationship; in others, he examines how physical artifacts inscribe a landscape with the sacred. In all the poems, he combines a spareness of style with a rich allusive base and a delicacy of sound.
Sonia Gernes
The zoom function of Cartledge’s poetic sequences renders the intimate cosmological and the cosmological intimate: “the way that small space / contains a whole world.” Equally at home among fractal logics as beside the histories of myth and religion, this is a learned and urgent writing which at its best is a welcome antidote to some of the more orthodox ironies of recent poetry.
Keith Tuma
From the sensual math of its topography through the nostalgic eroticism of its map of names to the excavations and rebuilding of its tableaux, Stacy Cartledge’s Within the Space Between is a beautiful book.
John Matthias
Stacy Cartledge lives in Pennsylvania, raises a family, and teaches at Delaware County Community College. In his poetry, mythos rubs the margins of science, trying to find the truth and hope lodged inside the quixotic. His poems ruminate philosophies of what is in between––between feeling and movement, between thought and intensity, between sex and action and love, between beginning and repetition. He can be found online at http://faculty.dccc.edu/~scartledge