SWING
Be prepared to be knocked out!
-- C. Dale Young, poetry editor, New England Review
Calvocoressi reads from Apocalyptic Swing on Sunday, November 15 at 1:30 p.m. in Auditorium Pavilion C (Parking Lot #9), along with fellow poets Kelle Groom, Stacey Lynn Brown, and Helen Pruitt Wallace.
AMAZON READER REVIEWS
Heartbreaking and glorious: a masterpiece.
By Josie Bliss (Brooklyn, NY USA)
poems about boxing, music, violence, sexuality, longing, love, race, Los Angeles, and the small towns of America. a heartbreaking - and ultimately redemptive - look at American culture in its danger and beauty. it reads almost like a short story collection; each poem is complex yet utterly readable, finely polished but wholly alive. i could almost feel the book breathing in my hands. if you love poetry, or if you have ever been curious about poetry but haven't found a way in, i couldnt recommend this book more highly. i'm grateful to Gabrielle Calvocoressi for bringing these poems into the world.
set in many locations
with a major nod to the world of boxing
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
What's a punch in the face? "Apocalyptic Swing" is a collection of poetry from Gabrielle Calvocoressi which focuses on the tenacity of the human spirit. Set in many locations with a major nod to the world of boxing, "Apocalyptic Swing" is a moving and intriguing collection of poetry ...
A rising star in the poetry world
By Charles A., Fowler (Concord, MA)
If you like poetry, you'll love Gabrielle Calvocoressi's new collection, "Apocalyptic Swing." If you're not a poetry lover, read these gems and you'll become one.
This small volume - 69 pages - is divided into three parts: 21 short poems; a longer - 15 pages - story about the travails of a boxer, "Training Camp: Deer Lake, PA"; and ends with eight powerful poems with more boxing themes, brutality, sadness, spirit and survival.
Other words that come to mind in describing Ms. Calvocoriessi's poems are insightful, intriguing, disturbing, even a hint of salaciousness; all overlaid with a spirit of optimism.
Impatiently awaiting the great reviews
By PersimmonVillage
Calvocoressi's writing joins that pantheon of writers such as Levine, Gluck, and others who cut clean through pretension to reveal pictures of our world as we sometimes wish not to see it. And this is the beauty of her poems. They sway, and indeed swing, and stop the reader cold, and to the many voices that reside in her lines, Calvocoressi contributes her own sweet, mournful timbre. There isn't much that the reader won't feel after reading the last line of her book: "We are almost champions now." Amen to that. Calvocoressi champions the boxer, the beaten, the beloved, and the broken with frightening intensity and clear-minded truth. In nearly flawless form and phrase, she champions the map of our 20th/21st century America with a veneration that humbles us all. This is jazz, blood, bones, and grit, all somehow bearing a joyous refrain. Her work contains clippings straight from hospital wards, asylums, parents and priests -- such saviors, from Sister Perpetua to Mother to the man who "could have passed me by and saved yourself" may not, in the end, rescue anyone. One leaves feeling that in some essential way, Calvocoressi's poems about the fight to save the self have in fact saved us.
Ask This World To Remember
By Rangi McNeil
Calvocoressi's voice is rooted firmly in America. These thirty precise poems remind us of the body's holiness & its necessity. They speak of love: sometimes desperate, sometimes bloody - always hard-won & worth its cost.
Apocalyptic Swing is a mesmerizing & necessary respite from the four walls of our daily lives. Reading it will inspire you to do everything you do (write, sing, love, breathe), better.
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