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The Only Fear I've Ever Had Is Standing Still
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By: Alvy Carragher
Publisher: The Gallery Press
Published: October 2026
Pages: 80
Categories: Literature, Poetry
Language: English
Available as: Paperback
On sale at:
ISBN-13: 9781917371339

In Alvy Carragher’s fourth collection, The Only Fear I've Ever Had Is Standing Still, a questioning voice moves between continents and through the fractured landscapes of memory. Poems ask how we continue after a difficult childhood, and how a life might be understood when the past resists any single, coherent narrative. In work that wonders why ‘some days get printed / on the heart’ the poet touches on survival and departure and on how we might go on.

Family is both refuge and source of harm, and father figures cast long shadows over these pages. Generations carry the effects of silence, mental illness and inheri-ted violence, yet the poems remain open to the wider world and to the possibility of kindness. In lines where ‘love [is] like a teaspoon scooping the sun / from a soft-boiled egg’ moments of tenderness become a way of enduring.

Energetic, expansive, and empathetic, this courageous book is as disquieting as it is consoling.

The trick was trusting myself.
I let my body leap and every time I landed I laughed.
It was all I could do to keep from shattering.

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