Description: Now in paperback, a spellbinding reinvention and exploration of self, gender, and family.
Brief description: Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of Apocalyptic Swing, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, and Rocket Fantastic. She is Associate Professor and Walker Percy Fellow in Poetry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an editor-at-large for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Review Quotes: Calvocoressi resists the limitations of language--especially where gender is concerned--to more fully capture the experience of a self "unlimited in its possibilities." The setting of her third collection is woodsy, nocturnal, and by turns sinister and merciful; where "it did get dark" enough to see the stars "but how bright it was." A range of characters compose a makeshift cast--or family--fluid enough to include a hermit, a cowboy, and a dowager. These poems balance wildness and control in a fearless treatment of eros, identity, trauma, and all that resists easy categorization. The voice encompasses the colloquial as well as the high lyrical: "Oak leaves so full of late summer// sun even I thought, Obscene, and stood stunned/ for a moment." When particular forms aren't up to the task of rendering something with tender and unflinching attentiveness, Calvocoressi reaches outside of poetry altogether: "Oh. It. Was. Beautiful. No metaphor will do."-- "Publishers Weekly"