Julie Carter's work would be too dark if not for all those flashes of brilliance. Death and decay are recurring themes. You could call her a formalist, as most of her poems are written in iambic pentameter, and many are sonnets, but her poems aren't about that, and often use rhyme and meter so subtly that you hardly notice them. Her aim, it seems to me, is to change the way you see things. For example, revolving police car lights in front of a neighbor's house:

Morning squad lights did not wait
politely outside the pane, knocking pause
or whisper through the carved mail slot door,
but spun to fire the phosphorescent starmap
painted on my walls, spun to light
her husband's shroud-passage,
my own breath sparkle.

Or the fern, "a fecund, restless thing that I could hold / before me like Medusa's head," or the heart surgery as "hoops of bone / the surgeons cracked and spread like swallow wings" - so many examples.

These are poems that reward multiple re-readings. I keep finding instances of meaningful wordplay I'd missed the last time around, that deepen the images and make them even more memorable.