I could hear them settling in the darkening branches. Many of the lines in these poems are plainly beautiful, as in the ending of this prose poem about falcons: These poems are bursting with animals and nature and the speaker’s relationship and oneness with the natural is apparent. There are hornets, foxes, falcons, cicadas, skies, bobcats, hills, orchards and more. Then smiles like no one’s looking, whose eyes getting blackĬalvocoressi’s settings and materials are also capacious-these poems span time, place, subjects-and in their spanning, the poems expand each other in unexpected ways. I like to watch whose start to watch the things On the latter, in naming characters “Bandleader” and “whose,” the act of naming becomes a kind of unnaming: It’s quite extraordinary how Calvocoressi evokes this feeling of fluidity through form and the language of naming. These “characters” intermix and interact in ways that feel at once separate and together. Throughout the Bandleader poems, the speaker and the Bandleader and the “whose” often feel like the same person. Hand along my skull until it rests below my neck, I like it when touches me there, right about the forehead This form mimics the identity of the Bandleader-fluid, complex, uncertain, and open: The poems where the Bandleader appears are often the poems where the lines are the longest as they sprawl across the page, stagger, and have quite a bit of space between them. It is simultaneously encompassing and fluctuation, pronounced by me with the intake of breath when a body is unlimited in its possibilities.” The Bandleader (through the segno) appears and disappears throughout the book and acts as kind of fluid thread that is at once linking and at once breaking things apart.

But capaciousness is a word that kept coming to mind when thinking about Calvocoressi’s book-in form, in subject matter, in voice, in spirit, and it’s one possible way to shape a stunning and intentionally shapeless book.Īt the beginning of Rocket Fantastic, a note to the reader tells us that the musical segno symbol (that looks like a fancy S with a slash through its middle and two dots on either side) “is used as a pronoun.when referring to the figure of the Bandleader.” The note goes on to explain that the segno “represents a confluence of genders in varying degrees, not either/or nor necessarily both in equal measure. So much is happening on so many levels in these poems that one could write about anything really. Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s third book of poems, Rocket Fantastic, is one of those books. I find the most challenging book reviews to write are the ones on books that are complex and ambitious. Novemin Uncategorized tagged Gabrielle Calvocoressi / Victoria Chang by Kristina Marie Darling

Rocket fantastic poems