IN THE BLUE HOUR by Carrie Magness Radna is a moving and multifaceted poetry collection that navigates the fragile intersections of love, memory, beauty, and despair. These poems carry the weight of longing, loss, and resilience while celebrating moments of tenderness and light. Radna writes of parents, lovers, and the world's chaos with a voice that is both vulnerable and unflinching, weaving images that shimmer between melancholy and hope. Her work balances candid observation with lyrical flight, evoking operatic tones and quiet confessions. At its heart, the collection is about surviving in a world on the brink—finding truth and beauty in sorrow, and discovering resilience where fragility seems to dominate. With poems that echo the timeless spirit of Keats while rooted in contemporary struggles, IN THE BLUE HOUR becomes not just a book of poetry, but a testament to the human capacity to endure, remember, and love.
"IN THE BLUE HOUR looks hard at that world, sometimes close enough to spit, sometimes far enough away to soar. It's a good, blue ride."-Tim Tomlinson
"Carrie Magness Radna is a poet of light and shadow, time and space, inner and outer oceans. Every hour holds years of meaning, and those meanings contain the seeds of their opposites, as a disaster contains all the beauty in the universe…"-Sharon Mesmer
"IN THE BLUE HOUR is a collection of poems about love 'stripped raw' but with 'honey-sap inside.' Carrie Magness Radna's voice is both tender and tough as she explores her attachments to a sometimes cruel world, and her poetic techniques are deftly displayed at every emotional pitch."-Robert Scotto
"It is a book of memory-of parents, lovers, men, women, damaged or lost; of sadness and pleasure, of loneliness and struggle with depression; of a chaotic world on the brink of destruction; a book of longing."-Anna Halberstadt
"Beauty, love, and melancholy are Carrie Magness Radna's themes. Her soft and gentle voice is elegiac. At their best, her poems present memorable images and metaphors that transcend our tragic limits. She might be called Keatsian in that her best poems convince readers that truth and beauty are one 'and all [we] know and need to know.'"-Mike Graves
"Poised alternately between the ascension of art and immersion in quotidian waters, between refinement and candid observation, forthright, associative, and free, with interpolated trills of operatic tremolo, covert confessional notes caught between chronicle and reflection, IN THE BLUE HOUR archives recollection's collage."-Jack Cooper
Carrie Magness Radna is an audiovisual cataloger at the New York Public Library, a choral singer and a poet who loves to travel. Her poems have previously appeared in The Oracular Tree, Mediterranean Poetry, Muddy River Poetry Review, Spillwords.com, Poetry Super Highway, Shot Glass Journal (Muse-Pie Press), Vita Brevis, Home Planet News, Cajun Mutt Press, Walt's Corner, Polarity eMagazine, The Poetic Bond (VIII-X), Alien Buddha Press, Jerry Jazz Musician, Rye Whiskey Review, Litterateur RW and First Literary Review-East. Her first poetry collection, Hurricanes never apologize (Luchador Press) was published in December 2019. Her new poetry collection In the blue hour (Nirala Publications), was published in February 2021. She won Honorable Mention Award twice, for "all trains are haunted" (Non-rhyming poetry: 2019) and "May (a Pantoum)" (Rhyming poetry: 2021) in Writer's Digest Writer's Competition. Born in Norman, Oklahoma, she now lives with her husband in Manhattan, New York.
"Carrie Magness Radna is a poet of light and shadow, time and space, inner and outer oceans. Every hour holds years of meaning, and those meanings contain the seeds of their opposites, as a disaster contains all the beauty in the universe." — Sharon Mesmer, Professor at The New School
"Poised alternately between the ascension of art and immersion in quotidian waters, between refinement and candid observation, forthright, associative, and free, with interpolated trills of operatic tremolo, covert confessional notes caught between chronicle and reflection, In The Blue Hour archives recollection's collage." — Jack Cooper, Poet
"It is a book of memory-of parents, lovers, men, women, damaged or lost; of sadness and pleasure, of loneliness and struggle with depression; of a chaotic world on the brink of destruction; a book of longing." — Anna Halberstadt, Poet
