St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped
In St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped, Ann Cefola rides the limn of prosaic disaster, from the loss of a neighborhood landmark, to a near-drowning, reprieves, and irrevocable losses. Each harbinger of mortality softly and insistently reiterates our piquant, poignant longing for meaning. And like the line from her poem, "Kerning," Cefola's work asserts the necessary optimism of a survivor: "In the text you create rivers of light."
New Releases
Blind fish who aren’t actually blind, alien cow-abductions, a dog who dreams of rotisserie chicken… from Wisconsin to Florida, Jesse Millner’s Shapes the Clouds Assume offers up a sweet and generous slice of the mutant, disturbingly familiar underbelly of Americana to startle us, make us cringe, and make us laugh out loud.
The micro-fictions and prose poems of Richard Holingers’s Hybrid Seeds: Little Fictions slip in and out of the voices of our time: a famous painter’s muse, a perplexed writing instructor, a motley gathering of familiar film heroes relaxing—or sliding into post-traumatic hallucination—together on bridge night.
On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles, Karren Alenier’s sixth collection of poetry, unfolds the exotic love story of Jane Auer and Paul Bowles, American expatriate writers considered to be the precursors of the American Beats. The poetic story begins after Jane’s death in 1973 as Paul and Jane’s Moroccan lover Cherifa sit smoking kif and revisit scenes from Jane and Paul’s lives. The insinuation is that Cherifa poisoned Jane. Paul says that Jane was his muse but did he bleed her pen dry?
This collection feeds Alenier’s libretto How Many Midnights, a multi-media opera-in-progress with her collaborator, composer John Supko. Alenier spent three weeks in 1982 in Tangier, Morocco, working on her poems about Gertrude Stein with Paul Bowles. In 2005, some of those poems about Stein premiered in Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, her first opera with composer William Banfield.