BOOKS

Rocket FantasticRocket Fantastic

Winner of The Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry

Persea Books | 2017 | ISBN 978-0-89255-485-0 | 92 pages

Hardcover, $25.95
Purchase: IndieBound / Amazon / Barnes & Noble

Paperback, $15.95
Purchase: IndieBound / Amazon / Barnes & Noble

From the publisher: Like nothing before it, Rocket Fantastic transfigures the landscape and language of gender and the body. Its poems are populated by figures both familial and fabular: a prodigal brother and a relentless father; the Hermit, Dowager, and Major General; and, perhaps most strikingly, the Bandleader, embodiment of sexual, capitalistic, and political dominance. Mythic and musical, erogenous yet wide-eyed, this is a dazzling book by a space-age troubadour of American poetry.

Praise for Rocket Fantastic

“A dance of self-discovery, subverting our assumptions of gender and the body. . . . Both innovative and sensual, Rocket Fantastic is a vital book for our time.”
—Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronical

“I did not want this book to end. It is the most compelling thing I have read this year, without contest, and so very timely.”
—Sarah Warren, World Literature Today

“A vertiginous, wondering, painful, uncannily and deeply sexy book.”
—Maureen N. McLane

Rocket Fantastic

Apocalyptic Swing

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

Persea Books | Paperback | $15.00 | ISBN 978-0-89255-412-6 | 96 pages
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From the publisher: Battered but never beaten, this narrator finds salvation in ecstatic communion with the gods of jazz and especially boxing: “O Tommy Hearns, O blood come down,” she prays. “Find your way to Hungerford where my/father glowers over me. Show him/how the bag does penance.” In such prayers she finds the strength to survive the home she has to leave and, once she does, the strength to face the fires she finds flaring the country over, from Los Angeles to Laramie. Apocalyptic Swing is a work of unbelievable force, a devastating and glorious testimony about America―its lore, disappointments, and promise.

Praise for Apocalyptic Swing

“Calvocoressi is a daring act as a poet/athlete. . . Her wild lyrics shudder and shine, jubilant and threatening, exuberant.”
—Carol Muske-Dukes, The Huffington Post

“Muscular and musical, this second collection from Calvocoressi combines boxing, Elvis, church burnings, sex and horses to produce a book that is pure Americana. . . . This is a compelling sophomore effort from a very promising poet.”
—Publishers Weekly

Rocket FantasticThe Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart

Winner of the 2006 Connecticut Book Award

Persea Books | 2005 / Paperback | $15.95 | ISBN 978-0-89255-315-0 | 68 pages
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From the publisher: Gabrielle Calvocoressi uses her prodigious gifts of imagination and empathy to give voice to the hope and heartbreak of small-town America. In painstaking, vernacular verse, she conveys the ambitions and failings of a distraught populace.

Praise for The Last Time I saw Amelia Earhart

“Calvocoressi brings keen and sympathetic attention to the local disasters the larger world has often overlooked.”
—Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review

“An excoriation of present-day America by a new and lethal commentator.”
—Times Literary Supplment

“Remarkable . . . teas[es] meaning out of a past. . .that still dogs us.”
—Sarah Goodyear, Time Out New York