“Is Nancy Naomi Carlson a prophetess or goddess? One ponders 
this question while reading Complications of the Heart. What will 
encourage the reader to genuflect is the range of her work as well 
as the mixture of passion and intellect. Carlson’s poems at times 
can be caught wearing lace. Maybe this is the formalism clinging to 
the hem of her muse. There is balance in this collection because 
Carlson once wore cigar bands and pop-top rings.”—E. Ethelbert 
Miller

    “Offering up sensuous language which is sometimes memorably 
formal and always musical, Nancy Naomi Carlson manages an 
eerie, provocative blend of poems about the different bodies of love 
a woman may inhabit. When she writes in ‘Sari-Covered Nights’ 
that ‘My five mouths roll their uvulas, / guttural as high winds 
crossing desert dunes,’ she speaks not only of the multiple lives we 
must recognize in ourselves, but also of the poet’s need and 
obligation to render many possibilities at once.”—Stephen Corey

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A native New Yorker, NANCY NAOMI CARLSON’s full-length 
collection of poetry, Kings Highway, won the 1997 Writers’ 
Publishing House competition. She also was a winner of The Ledge 
2002 Poetry Awards competition. Featured on Poetry Daily, her 
work has also appeared in Poet Lore, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, 
Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Poetry 
Review, Texas Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor for Tupelo 
Press and runs a community writers’ group at Barnes and Noble.