Carrie Chappell

 Loving Tallulah Bankhead, Paris Heretics, September 2022.

PRAISE FOR LOVING TALLULAH BANKHEAD:

“Dazzling, incisive, conspiratorial, sexy—Loving Tallulah Bankhead is a pursuit of abandon, wrought with great care, and a testament to the ways artists save each other, inspire each other, create worlds together. Reading Chappell’s pressurized, increasingly brazen poems, and viewing Lauren Patterson’s poignant accompanying drawings, I’m reminded of the paradoxical power of performance to activate a fuller, truer, freer self. It’s a thrill to see Tallulah Bankhead—that gorgeously subversive Alabamian—written toward with such imagination, playfulness, veneration, and vulnerability.”

—Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat

“In Carrie Chappell's Loving Tallulah Bankhead, the defiant star plays Virgil, leading our poet-speaker through Alabama, the home state of Chappell and Bankhead. The sequence crescendoes when the two women dress in their ‘fathers’ trousers’ to surreptitiously burn a hoop skirt, that emblem of Southern aristocracy, white supremacy, and patriarchy. While Dante's journey brings him closer to God, Chappell's journey brings her closer to other women, teaching her to not only love Tallulah Bankhead but women writers, rivals, crushes, her mother, and herself, all of whom the culture has tried to reduce to mere ‘acolyte, ornament, girl.’  Chappell's maximalist aesthetic triumphs over convention and conventional lyricism: ‘Each pearl is a word—/Deluxe and dogmatic. I pull them off, all that we've let slip, from their mouths/Into ours.’ Elegantly illustrated by native Alabamian Lauren Patterson, Chappell's Loving Tallulah Bankhead is a book for ‘American-Women-Wishing-to-be-French’—and we are many!— to hold close.”  

—Carolyn Hembree, author of Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague 

"What does it mean to be a ‘proper southern woman?’ What does it mean to be our authentic selves? Carrie Chappell's imaginative and confessional collection, Loving Tallulah Bankhead, moves through these questions in poems that are intimate, reflective, and deeply personal. Chappell defies conventions of time and form in this book, which opens pathways for liberation, love, and for a powerful blooming of the self.”

—Ashley M. Jones, author of REPARATIONS NOW! and Poet Laureate of the State of Alabama

PRESS AND REVIEWS

Bee Baldwin on Loving Tallulah Bankhead at Alabama Writers’ Forum:

“In this book, the relationship between poet and muse is tangible and intimate. Tallulah is a physical presence in the poems as she stands at the side of the speaker as they wear only pearls in the Alabama night (‘Tallulah Sits Beside Me on the Banks of the Cahaba River’), ride wild down Alabama highways and cartwheel like ‘nymphs’ in ‘Tallulah and I Drive the Hoop Skirt,’ and share a bath together in ‘Lifeboat.’ Tallulah Bankhead is ‘a haunted house.’ She acts as another voice in the poems, showing off her quick-as-a-whip wit and humor in many of the pieces: ‘Well, certainly Alabama isn’t all mud puddle! / Just look at me! Oh, Darling! Whatever chigger bit me, I bit back!’ Tallulah Bankhead is alive once again in Chappell’s poetry, untamed and boisterous as ever.”

Rachel Nix on Loving Tallulah Bankhead in Screen Door Review: Literary Voices of the Queer South:

“Chappell conjures Tallulah with precision. The drawl, as husky as it is devastating, is audible in the lines. Though the real Tallulah likely never uttered any of this, we’re none the wiser. This is a testament to both Chappell’s craft and devotion: she can alternate between her own voice and Tallulah’s cleanly and with care. That’s not to say there’s anything careful about this collection. The poems kick at and stomp on the history that’s kicked and stomped on our kind, exposing the cruelties and unearned judgments following southern women from birth to burial. Chappell and Tallulah are done with conforming, opting instead to burn skirts and bury old ideas. They own themselves and free the rest of us. We watch the unraveling of it all; the big show: our autonomy being granted by the woman America tried to undo a lifetime ago.”

Katharine Armbrester on Loving Tallulah Bankhead in the Southern Review of Books:

“Loving Tallulah Bankhead is the perfect book not just for nonconforming Southerners, but for all who want to learn more about the darkness behind the South’s beauty: ‘We call upon our haunted / Sisters who have had to leave / To save their minds.’ It’s not just for ‘spooky, ruined women’ but for all rebels. Despite their similarities and their intimacy, Chappell’s Tallulah remains elusive as the scent of perfume, vague but still intoxicating. Her mystique is most potent when ultimately left unexplained and when instead her nemesis, the ugliness of patriarchy, is illumined with blinding light.”

Nicole Smith’s article on Loving Tallulah Bankhead in Daily Mountain Eagle of Jasper, Alabama (Tallulah’s hometown):

“An Alabama native, who now lives in Paris, France, will be traveling to Walker County this week to share a collection of poems she wrote about Jasper's own Tallulah Bankhead.

Carrie Chappell wrote ‘Loving Tallulah Bankhead’ to pay tribute to the beloved actress, and Chappell will be reading excerpts from her poetry collection book at Tallulah Brewing Company on Wednesday, Dec. 28, at 6 p.m. 

The Vestavia Hills native said she became fascinated with Tallulah Bankhead at a young age and decided to make her the subject of her second book.

‘It’s difficult for me to identify the exact moment I discovered Tallulah Bankhead. Certainly, I have a long memory of knowing her name, all those lovely syllables, and something of her iconographic gesture,’ Chappell said. ‘I have a memory of watching her through a mirror as the television screen in my parents’ room reflected her in the company of Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, and Vivian Vance. My brother and I would often fall asleep on our mother’s arms in our parents’ room as we watched Nick at Nite. I still think of this encounter with her because the volume was muted, and I was all the same enraptured to watch her without her voice.’

Chappell continued, ‘What I’ve supplanted onto the memory today, is what I now know was a kind of joy in 'listening to her' through the quiet, the dark, while my mother and brother were themselves mute with sleep. She seemed still to make so much noise as I wrote over the hush with what I imagined were her words. Tallulah Bankhead was as much a wonder to watch and hear as she was to imagine.’”

The special editions are limited to 50 copies and are numbered and signed by both myself and illustrator Lauren Patterson. Each special edition comes with a souvenir pendant and a copy of my handwritten letter to Tallulah.