*Ebook version of The Experience of Being a Cathedral available at Amazon and other retailers or complimentary pdf download*
![An image of the cover for The Experience of Being a Cathedral.](https://www.kerrycarnahan.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Cover-Image-ebook-1-766x1024.png)
“A whirling lusty journey across our mis/anthropocene.. I wanna follow this polymath of the heart thru all the flowers and detritus.” — Caroline Conway
“Unlike anything or anyone. Ravishing, irrepressible, maximalist, utterly astonishing.” — Ari Banias, author of Anybody
On April 4, 2020, the New York Times reported the Cathedral of St. John the Divine was preparing to convert into a field hospital for Covid-19 patients. Though this might seem strange, noted the Dean of the Cathedral, cathedrals have historically been used this way. “So,” he said, “this is not outside the experience of being a cathedral, it is just new to us.”
The Experience of Being a Cathedral is a bit like that cathedral-turned-hospital. Mostly it’s a trashy romance set in Lawrence Kansas against politically manufactured austerity and reckonings that can’t quite be said to be strictly personal. A Kansas dialect kicks up dust in “Morning After Halloween,” taking the reader for a drive out into the mother tongue cadence. Now that route takes a while, so if you’re short on time you can cut across via the title poem “The Experience of Being a Cathedral.”
A limited quantity of first edition paperback copies featuring cover artwork and design by Camilo Rojas-Lavado are available – email lettucerunbooks at gmail dot com.
Praise for The Experience of Being a Cathedral
“What if the one you first saw as a veiled woman by the flock of your bros came now however many centuries later to tell what she’s seen flying in her house above the post-9/11 desert of the real. Yet this is no Little Ontology on the Prairie but what if poetry were now the cathedral converted into a hospital for the collective soul. What more do we need to trust god but “a lone butch disentangling earth from heaven under a naked bulb”? Not much but to be permitted into the wound that never asked to be a sigil in the first place. Kerry Carnahan writes like she knows.” — Ana Božičević, author of JOMO and Rise in the Fall
![Cartoon author photo.](https://www.kerrycarnahan.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/crop-0-0-695-697-0-Carnahan_cartoon-bio-pic-2-1.jpg)
“For those who understand shit talk’s capacity to hold more complex truths than many other forms of speech, here is the blunt, maximalist, digressive and unrelenting “startled violet [that] wakes / itself up queefing”– hilarious and oracular, a poetry wholly unpredictable, sucking its own “blood back / out the scrawniest most dishonest trope,” running its mouth off against any whiff of amnesia.” — Ari Banias, author of Anybody and A Symmetry
Content from the booklet and deluxe visual material are also occasionally available on instagram at experience.ofbeing.a.cathedral.