The Life

Praise for Carrie Fountain's most recent collection, Instant Winner:

"It is not simply a colloquial quality of seeming friendliness that draws me to Fountain; underneath this voice, there is a highly charged current of desire and need . . . [Instant Winner] also speaks with startling intimacy about the world and the body, that microcosm of all experience." - The Kenyon Review

"The poems of Instant Winner are fraught prayers, full of doubt and ambivalence and hopeful agnosticism. They are poems seated in insularity. But they spark and flare out and off the page. Exploring change, relationships, parenthood, Instant Winner revels in the contained space while hungering for transcendence . . . these poems are often explicitly about being a mother, but Fountain does not stray into sentimentality, she deconstructs contemporary expressions of motherhood." - The Rumpus

"Deceptively simple with their straightforward language, the poems are so new and honest that the reader feels confided in, asked to embrace each feeling, thought, or word like a babe in arms, with careful attention, aware of its fragility and the fragility of every moment." - Booklist