Publications
New chapbook --Glint -- is out now in bookstores and online.
“In “Glint,” Carole Symer traces the rhythm of a long love story with flashes of sights, smells, and hints of inside jokes — the way intimacy truly unfolds. By sharing it, she has given us a gift of pure pleasure.”
—Monica Banks, Artist
“A glint is a small flash of light; to slip, slide, or gleam; to shine with particular attention. The poems in Carole Symer’s debut chapbook, Glint, are radiant, hot blooded, self-assured, and infused with potent energy. She begins with a fragment of Sappho and ends with a standing wave. Along the way there is marriage, international adoption, food, flowers, and “the scent of human soft”. You may laugh out loud as you read this work. You will recognize honest truths.”
—Holly Wren Spaulding, author of Familiars
July 2026
Four Way Review,
Interview by Carole Smyer
Spring 2026
Jet Fuel Review
September 2025
Maya’s Micros
Fall 2024
LIT Magazine
April 2024
The Adroit Journal
Carole Symer: Thank you for taking the time for this interview, J. Mae. When I received my copy of Tender Machines, I devoured it. I found it so instructive and an urgent balm. I’m eager to find out more about the making of this collection, the poet’s true heart, as well as learning about your muses and fixations and what spaces you find especially tender these days. As someone who also straddles multidisciplinary arts while keeping up with motherhood (I think we might have daughters the same age if my math and the 2015 NYT article is correct), girlfriends, and sociopolitical vexations as a private citizen, nothing feels private anymore, much less tender. Hence, the need for the piles of poetry books strewn throughout my house. Yet, yours are the poems that woo me to look inside myself, my relationships, as well as outside my window. Is there a reader you held in mind as you were writing these poems and, if so, how would you describe that reader?
Summer 2023
Green Linden Press
April 2023
Midway Journal
May 12, 2022
Tupelo Quarterly
If there is ever a poetry collection we need close by us in the night, to stir us from our creeping dread, hands down it is in Cameron Morse’s Bad Astrocyte (Woodley Press, 2021). Though dedicated “for the diagnosed” (i.e., of glioblastoma, a highly malignant brain tumor), we are all Morse’s beneficiaries. Master of the minimalist enjambment, Morse escorts us on a fast-track tour from kitchen to hospital room, hoofing it through Home Depot with a toddler in tow—no ordinary flicker of bulbs here, but a full-on floodlight to get us through. His is the poetry of our dying that exposes both the surprise and the inevitable...
Selfie-interests,
By Dr. Carole Symer
December 26, 2017
Across the Margin
An attempt to slow down the conversation, to contemplate the emotional shadows flickering in the room in the real-time space between us. An examination of the enigmatic ways of the intellectually precocious, ambitious and globally aware Trailing Millennials…
Literacy and Liberty for All: Why Detroit’s Kids Need More than Access to a School or a Lap
BY Dr. Carole Symer
October 10-16, 2018
Michigan Chronicle
"In 1974, twenty years after the Brown v. the Board’s ruling that segregation by race was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court reinstated segregation in Detroit. While acknowledging that Detroit students’ Constitutional rights had been violated, the decision was to put the burden back on Detroit and spare White suburbia. Thurgood Marshall disagreed, along with three other judges, arguing that “School district lines, however innocently drawn, will surely be perceived as fences to separate the races.” Justice Douglass added, “Michigan by one device or another has over the years created black school districts and white school districts,” and, in doing so, “the State washes its hands of its own creations.”
Literacy undergirds everything. Check the stats. Together, let’s check our biases against children, and re-invest in literacy and liberty for all."
Between Now & Next
BY CAROLE SYMER
Spring 2021
Sky Island Journal, Issue #16
upward mobility, from scratch & when the beach plums are scarlet
BY CAROLE SYMER
July 2020
Wild Roof Journal, Issue #3
so much of the world inside & marriage spells
BY CAROLE SYMER
January 10th, 2019
MUTHA MAGAZINE
