The Materials
An Intersection of Poetry and Visual Art
by Robert Carr

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Through the poems of Robert Carr and the assemblages of Kurt Reynolds, The Materials explores personal history through language and artifact. Responding to Reynolds’s constructed worlds, Carr’s poems enter and expand them, allowing a surprising, yet archetypal, family history to emerge: a father whose hands know rope better than tenderness, a mother stitching baptismal gowns, children whispering into darkened rooms. In the surreal journey of The Materials, that history fractures—children are lost to imagined deaths, mothers return as hauntings, ships tip out of their frames and into water. What begins as artifact becomes elegy. A collaboration in which visual art initiates and poetry transforms, The Materials gives voice to what the objects alone cannot hold.

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The pairing of poetry and images in The Materials is an achievement and Kurt Reynolds’ artwork is well suited to literary interpretation. Entering Kurt’s studio is like stumbling upon an archeological dig. One is surrounded by beautiful, often ancient objects and the component parts of things that feel recognizable but remain elusive. Maybe most profound is how scale operates in Kurt’s work. Larger pieces are forceful but somehow convey the intimacy implicit in the smaller works, and conversely the smaller works, as they draw you in, vibrate with meaning and power. Every artwork invites meditation on something we should be thinking about – love, human connection, the ways that human politics breakdown and catalyze harm. It’s work that asks for contemplation and deciphering, work that unfolds with time and careful observation. -Pete Hocking, retired lecturer, Rhode Island School of Design, and painter. The Materials is a collaboration in the truest sense: Kurt Reynolds's assemblages and Robert Carr's poems sit across from each other on the page, and neither one illustrates the other. Carr robs the artworks—wood, rope, bone, baleen—and turns them into flesh, inheritance, wound. A father's belt becomes a "talisman of family lies." A brother strings another brother's ribs into a harp, and the poem refuses to say whether that's violation or tenderness, because in this family the two were never separable. By the final spread, an axe has split a martyr's halo and three boys are holding each other together with nothing left to hold onto but the wreckage. Look back at Reynolds's works after reading Carr's poems, and you can't see either the same way again. -José Enrique Medina, winner of Lambda Literary’s 2026 J. Michael Samuel Prize. The Materials presents a collaboration between an artist and poet that opens portals. I’m astounded by the ways these artists transform their lives: through dialectical exchange, both the poem and image are altered by the hermeneutics of relationality. This is not only poetic device but a searing look into how we relate to one another in these days of siloed imaginations and isolation. What I love about The Materials apart from the stunning visual art and poetic images, is that they invite readers to participate, to transform through the wormholes of text into new meaning. -Rajiv Mohabir, author of Banbas / Exile: A Ramayan Retelling

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Robert Carr was born in Annapolis, Maryland, 1959. He is a graduate of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where he studied philosophy and was a member of the Bates Dance Ensemble. Following his undergraduate work, Robert moved to Portland, Maine, where he pursued a brief career in the arts as an actor with the Children’s Theater of Maine. In 1984, Robert moved to Boston, volunteered with the AIDS Action Committee, and became the first HIV-testing counselor with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. In response to the HIV pandemic, Robert engaged in a thirty-three-year career in public health. He recently retired from the position of Deputy Director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences in Massachusetts. Robert is a twelve-time Pushcart-nominated poet whose work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Cortland Review, Crab Orchard Review, Greensboro Review, Lana Turner, Maine Review, Massachusetts Review, Rattle, Seneca Review, Shenandoah, Sonora Review, swamp pink, Tar River Poetry, and other publications. He is co-editor for the 2019 Ghana Literary Group anthology, Bodies and Scars, and a 2022 Monson Arts resident. He is a participating poet for Writing the Land, an initiative pairing poets and land trusts. As a recognized assemblage artist and musician, Kurt Reynold's work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and venues including the Somerville Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His work has been covered extensively in newspapers and arts journals. He has participated in exhibitions at SPOKE Gallery in Boston, the Provincetown Art Association Museum, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Rice Pollack Gallery, among other venues. Images selected for The Materials are drawn from Kurt’s first large-scale installation of assemblages in Provincetown, How Far Is the World, and other recent work.

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Contributors

Author

Robert Carr

Artist

Kurt Reynolds