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Publisher’s Weekly

“In this haunting debut, Carlise creates an ars moriendi out of the legends of L’Inconnue de la Seine…  exploring this [death] mask’s history in photograph and text, Carlise builds a tender world from his obsessions…”  (read the whole review)

Nick Flynn

“Chuck Carlise ties the past into the present in ways that are melancholic, haunted, and beautiful.  You think you’re out of th enightmare, but you’re not.  That’s / the joke.  THe nightmare wants to live, / & its hands are on the wheel.”

Maurice Manning

“This rich and rigorous book draws o many sources, beginning with the famous legend of The Unknown Woman of the Seine.  One learns that drowning in 19th century Paris was for women of a certain station the fashionable means of suicide.  The idea that death could be an event one may plan and design — as an art, with an approving audience — becomes the murky center of these deeply mediative, interwoven poems.  The notion is at once absurd, disturbing, yet ultimately believable.  Stitched through this black tapestry is the poet’s more personal thread, tying him to an inquiry that has to do with the darkness of making anything absolute.  Perfect beauty cannot live long; in fact, perfection of any kind is doomed.  And yet th eidea of perfection has been dangerously attractive for a long, long time.”

Martha Serpas

“Out of our primal fears — drowning, freezing, losing ourselves — Chuck Carlise has fashioned an ingenuous libretto of inquiry and intrigue.  While revealing the corporeal drama of girl and Seine, mask and mystery, he unveils a host of spiritual paradoxes: What does missing mean if an existence is uncertain?  If we can tell a story ‘but not all of it,’ how do we claim knowledge of anything at all?”

Valparaiso Poetry Review

Valparaiso Poetry Review lists In One Version of the Story as a “recommended new book” (2017)