Rocket fantastic

Rocket fantastic Poems

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Book - 2017

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Subjects
Poetry.
Published
New York, New York : Persea Books Inc [2017]
Language
English
Main Author
Gabrielle Calvocoressi (author)
Item Description
"Karen & Michael Braziller Book."
Physical Description
xi, 92 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780892554850
  • Acknowledgments
  • A Note for the Reader
  • Shave
  • [There's a point where it all gets still]
  • The Sun Got All Over Everything
  • [I remember Dad would tell us the story of Isaac]
  • [S/S's huge. Standing there in the woods]
  • Major General
  • Let yourself get loose and double
  • Achingly Beautiful How the Sky Blooms Umber at the End of the Day, Through the Canopy
  • [Locked away we're like a Russian novel]
  • [It's not all bad, I mean we laugh out here]
  • [I like it when S/S touches me there, right above the forehead]
  • [Out here it's okay to be nothing]
  • In a Landscape of Perpetual Springtime
  • She Ties My Bow Tie
  • [The Bandleader calls it the Angel Position]
  • [Dad and I, we once went up to the mountains]
  • Major General
  • [Falcon in the trees, bobcat in the grasses]
  • Fox
  • Major General
  • [S/S's really beautiful. When S/S's standing in the trees]
  • [If I wait long enough I'll hear them nesting]
  • I Had a Mane Once
  • [I was on all fours]
  • The Good Guy's Got No Chance, It's Sad
  • [S/S's really beautiful when S/S thinks no one is looking]
  • Major General
  • [I like it when S/S touches me there]
  • [S/S said, I want you in my mouth]
  • [T. says it's fine because they don't understand the things we're saying.]
  • Major General
  • Some Thoughts on Building the Atom Bomb
  • [I like the twang and sometimes we can hear it on the radio]
  • Four Long Years At Court
  • Null Point
  • Dry Season at the End of the Empire
  • Major General
  • [I like to watch whose start to want things]
  • [It's a long way to go to get away]
  • "I was popular in certain circles"
  • [Some kids killed a goat and cooked him in the ground]
  • [You can hold a duck down on a rock and cut its head off]
  • In the Darkness of the House of Pleasure
  • Who Holds The Stag's Head Gets to Speak
  • Praise House: The New Economy
  • [The paint Chipped away on the wall looked like the bull]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Calvocoressi (Apocalyptic Swing) resists the limitations of language-especially where gender is concerned-to more fully capture the experience of a self "unlimited in its possibilities." (To announce the repeated manifestations of her recurring character the Bandleader, Calvocoressi uses the musical segno symbol, signifying a "confluence of genders in varying degrees, not either/or nor necessarily both in equal measure.") 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." Various animals populate the mountains, grasses, and trees: deer, falcons, bobcats, and foxes. "And yes," the speaker in "I Had a Mane Once" reminds readers, "I was every inch an animal." 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." (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

In this follow-up to Apocalyptic Swing, a finalist for the Los Angeles Time Book Award, queer lesbian poet Calvocoressi uses the Dal Segno, a musical symbol directing the player to return to an earlier spot in the score, as a pronoun embodying "a confluence of genders" when referencing the Bandleader. There's a sense that the speaker wants to return to an earlier time, too, a throwback feel to the pastoral scenes she sets and a need to shuck convention. The speaker and the Bandleader meet in a series of poems strung throughout this thought-provoking collection, and the use of the Dal Segno immediately strips away expectation, making the focus on the acts of looking and touching rather than body parts interacting conventionally. The resulting escalating eroticism and uneasy tension are something like the "tightness/ in my back" that the speaker allows to "open where my wings would/ be" before turning from sun-slicked girls at a pool and declaring memorably, "Somewhere my mother was dying/ and someone was skinning a giraffe./ And I let it go. I just let it go." VERDICT Occasionally meandering but capable of some real surprises: "You haven't lived until a fox/ has whispered something the ferns told him/ in your one good ear." © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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