Description: A ruminative collection of poetry that is mystified by life in our built and natural world.
Cameo Blue is a spiritual topography, recording the traces of people in their environments, natural and otherwise, and the portents, memories, and signs they use to navigate their path or understand the precipices they face. Lush with color, weather, and imagery, some poems are driven by breathless conjecture, or propelled by the acute observation that often comes with shock, when time stands still and a camera flash reveals the gap between external and internal, hope and fear, past and future. Other poems cross physical and emotional space more quietly, with a narrative voice like the intimate whisper of a secret podcast. The collection is its own immersive environment for the reader to fall into, with poems that take on a talismanic quality, laden with haunted characters, resonant objects, and occult signs.Brief description: Carolyn Guinzio is the author of seven previous collections, including A Vertigo Book. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and other journals. Her other books include Spoke & Dark and Ozark Crows, a collection of visual poems. A Chicago native, she has lived just outside Fayetteville, Arkansas, since 2002. Her website is carolynguinzio.tumblr.com
Review Quotes: "I am in awe of Carolyn Guinzio. Every poem in this book is a sea--an immense, mystic system made of both salt and dream, and what is the dream? That time bends grief the way water bends light; that being separates us, only so that we might know we are never apart. Cameo Blue startles me alive."-- "Rebecca Gayle Howell"