Bøger af Gerry LaFemina

The prose poem is the literary sphinx, the literary chimera, minotaur, gryphon-part one thing, part another and at their best, they're magical, mythical. Fantastic Imaginary Creatures collects the best contemporary prose poems that demonstrate the potentiality and plasticity the form allows. Some of these poems have been previously published, and some are brand spanking new.

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the English into Italian by Elisa Biagini. Winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize. What draws me to Gerry LaFemina's poems is how much of the world they contain: Brooklyn streets, race-tracks, Vietnam, a boy's imagined transgressions, family dramas. What is compelling is the tension between the speaker's urge to understand and the mystery that resists explanation--the partial understandings, the misunderstandings of childhood.... Public and private collide, intersect, as events and images become more difficult to reconcile, to describe. LaFemina's poems ripple with erotic desire, the budding sexuality of young boys, the lure of the nape hidden under a woman's hair, the interiority of the boy who'd slid into the sleeve of the dark suit left by his father. It's a rich world...a gritty and tender gamble--Donna Masini.

Gerry LaFemina is not so much a presence in contemporary poetry as a blur of movement, a quick phrase of enlightenment, a dharma bum of punk and junk. He watches nuns getting drunk in a bar, hears Leonard Cohen on the juke, drinks the blaze of light in every glass. Like Whitman, who inspired both Kinnell and Kerouac, LaFemina understands the body's demands, "Its sweat, toils, & passions. It's holy vigor." LaFemina rides the rapids of contemporary America: pain and ecstasy, ruin and treasure, angels and vultures, half-moon like a half-eaten cookie are confused in a cascade of feeling, an elegy for wild love and boundless grief. -Michael Simms"What is it about the past / that it seems to want to last, to linger into the present?" poet Gerry LaFemina asks us in this powerful collection of poems. Here, remembrances of a precarious childhood in a decaying city illuminate the details of our contemporary moment. These are songs of innocence and experience, in which the gaze of an adult reminiscent narrator makes meaning of a complicated past-unearthing both unnoticed beauties and unacknowledged terrors. Hurtling into the uncertainties of a future that is simultaneously unrecognizable yet familiar, LaFemina finds foothold in fleeting sweetness, in the beauty of the ephemeral moment. In these gorgeously tumbling lyrical lines, meticulously-honed images and details are polished to a burnished glow by the sheen of memory and loss. LaFemina writes, "This is how / we learn heartache, how even a name can be haunted / because a name can be a house we live in for years / waking in the empty rooms of its syllables." After all that is named within this syllabary of poems, the reader will depart the book feeling recognized, feeling haunted, feeling sung to and prayed for, feeling comforted and irrevocably human. -Lee Ann Roripaugh

Features re-readings and reviews of such late 20th Century poets as Anne Sexton, Larry Levis, Charles Wright, Patricia Goedicke, and Wendell Berry, as well as provides commentaries on poetic craft, the prose poem, and what it means to be a poet. LaFemina is a shrewd critic, and these essays will make us become inquisitive and curious.