Cant Republic by Chad Parenteau

Review by Lo Galluccio

Just a few days before this very contentious Presidential election, I sat down with Chad Parenteau’s latest offering: a chapbook called, Cant Republic, whose cover features a photo of Donald Trump in a face mask with the word, “Placebo” scrawled on it. My first question was is “cant” a real word and it is. The definition is “hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious or political nature.” Of course, there is also the play on the word “can’t” as if this republic, resting on Trump’s words alone, is an impossible one to sustain. And cant rhymes nicely with rant. But “cant” is the perfect word choice for this author’s take on the former President’s way of expressing himself as a so-called leader.



This is a book of erasure and blackout poems, where the author has taken out words, and repeated words and phrases, to show us the sort of underlying spell Trump is casting. My favorite erasure work is one by Phoebe Reeves of the Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, which was released in 1486, a treatise on witchcraft by a German Catholic clergyman.

It was employed to persecute mainly if not exclusively women, of the sorcery of witchcraft. Its language is quite elevated and sometimes brutal in its call for the torture and extinction of witches. It was considered the standard handbook on witches until well into the 18th century.

One technique Reeves uses is to change the word “heresy” to “her “in her redaction in order to uncover the woman these poems speak about. I haven’t read the entirely of The Flame of her Will but admire the brilliant and beautiful way Reeves has altered this text into something like its opposite. For example:



“God, groping blindly, does not always give the world life. God is subject to a woman.”



Parenteau’s project is slightly different. It’s a timely exercise in stripping down Trump’s speeches into the marrow of their meaning, and as the back cover testifies to “a gutting of Democracy and civil rights, a boosting of ego and bravado, a moral and ethical decay that takes us all down with it.” Mark Lipman



Indeed, many Americans are aware of the pseudo-fascist nature of Trump’s charisma. There are still his robust followers who believe him to be a good leader and even great speaker. Perhaps never in the history of the U.S. has there been such a polarizing Presidential figure, a man who was impeached in office, but who unlike Richard Nixon, declined to resign; who has been convicted of 34 felony counts and who also refused to concede the 2020 election, even when there was ample evidence to prove it was free and fair.



In his introduction, Parenteau explains:



“The poems based on transcripts were less erasure or blackout poems and more highlight poems. As the pandemic went on, I spent my days going through pages and pages of his words with a

highlighter (orange of course) capturing what I judged to be his rampant ID and rotted ego (which has become one single monstrous voice…)



Clearly, despite his brazen lies and ridiculous non-sequiturs, Trump has managed to create a devoted following and one has to wonder what Americans really pay attention to, if not the words themselves? Some argue that Trump is loved for being an outsider, an anomaly and that his dumbed down rhetoric appeals to those turned off by the liberal Democratic Party elites. Be that as it may, Parenteau has chosen to wield a poet’s tool against the “brazen nonsense” that Trump imparts.



In the first piece, “Cant Republic,” he captures these words:



“It was

victory

we’re now

Trump territory

voters

overturned.”

P 8



and



“fraud

American public

this

country

this election

win this

win

to ensure

the

nation

this

‘ very big

nation

we want the law

to stop

in the morning…”

p 10



In the longest piece “Rough Beast Born,” a title taken from the Yeats’ poem, we see the colliding opposites in Trump’s speech, the endless repeating of words and phrases like “thank you” and “quarantine” and “ we’re setting records” and “terrible (people)” and “to beat” and “incredible.” He is a master of repeating simple phrases made to ingratiate himself, to subdue, to dramatize

during a public health crisis where millions of lives were at stake and when the US lost more lives than any industrialized nation with Trump at the helm.



“for decades

African Americans

children

African Americans

we are reversing

your

countries

ended

I am

the globe

I am

American.”

P 28



and



“a thing called murder

we won

did you see that

we won

p 30



And on the subject of healthcare Chad has uncoded these riffs:



“we killed

we’re trying to kill

you’ll have

preexisting conditions

preexisting conditions

doubled

think of that.”

P 33



and



“…you’re terminally ill

go home and

die

terminally ill

go to Asia

go to Europe

sign paper

get results

unbelievable

unbelievable”

p 33



It is perhaps the most powerful section in this book: the clear bullshit that Trump as President spewed about public health and the epidemic, how unwilling he was to engage in facts, to empathize or truly boost morale through positive action without his political ego being at stake. That familiar refrain, “unbelievable, unbelievable” that he ends so many of his crazy assertions with.



“we are

epidemic

deaths

disease

big deal

disease

people die

so much work

die from overwork

for a long time

The word

they have to do

so much easier

such an honor

great thing

great thing”

p 34





Parenteau has in some cases, bolded words to underscore their significance:



“til the end

I don’t get enough

I need

more….”

P 36



The Don uses words like “swamp, “invokes the expression “dirty people,” and “incredible stories,” always to somehow both denigrate and glorify the people who he’s trying to win over. In this poem, Parenteau highlights his subconscious fears and desires. Trumps tries to honor Americans who work but comes back to his administration’s greatness. How many times have we heard him say, “It’s gonna be great?” So vague, casual and pompous all at once.



The chapbook concludes with four shorter poems that encapsulate an episode of the Trump Presidency. In “At Home” the author transcribes:



“I know

pain

I know

hurt

we had

us

a landslide

everyone knows…

law and order

we

hurt

very tough…

This was

play

people

you’re

what happens

you

are

so bad

so evil

I know

You feel

peace

p 47



Again, Trump’s catch phrases of winning by a landslide, of law and order, of it being “very tough” for him, always to win sympathy and then the extreme demonizing “so bad/so evil” and the placating of “I know/you feel/peace.” This is the dance Trump does over and over -- the lying bravado and the simple attempt to identify with his people, draw them in with a statement as simple as “it’s tough” and then the reassuring statement at the end. In this version we see that Trump could as easily be calling his own followers, “so bad, so evil,” when of course he was alluding to his detractors in real time.



This poem was taken from a transcript of Trump’s January 6th words to Capitol rioters telling them to go home. And this was the event that for many Americans, marked the lowest point of his Presidency, an insurrection on the Capitol, an attempt to block, through violence, the certification of the people’s vote.



This is an ingenious collection that serves as a kind of testimonial to Trump’s deceptive and deceiving rhetoric, especially evident during the Pandemic.

September 12 Andrea Carter Brown

 

September 12

Andrea Carter Brown

The Word Works

Washington D.C.

Copyright 2021

109 pages

Review by Lo Galluccio

I left New York City’s Lower East Side around September 1^st, 2001 to stay briefly at my mother’s place in Cambridge, expecting to hear about a tour of Italy I had been devising with my band and a promoter in Rome. When my plans fell through, I fell into a deep depression which persisted through the morning hours of September 11^th. It was my little sister who said, “This is one of the saddest days in US history,” and roused me from my morose bed-ridden state to watch the horrifying television repeating loop of the airplanes, piloted by al-Qaeda terrorists, crash the Twin Towers in New York City, the event we now call, 9/11. The cavernous holes and billowing smoke, the fire and ash, was a harrowing signal that the US had been brutally and systematically attacked by people who hated us and our way of life. I had worked as a temp secretary in the World Trade Center for Smith Barney, the largest tenant of the Towers, who managed to evacuate all their employees. It was soon revealed that American capitalism was under siege, that Osama Bin Laden and his corps had masterminded an attack on the heart and symbol of it in New York City, our own country’s cultural Mecca And while I had never fully bought into the system as a full-time employee, certainly not as a manager or executive, I felt that those people who had been killed, the nearly 3,000 of them, were innocent in some fundamental way. It was indeed a tragic day for America and a tragic day to be an American. 9/11 was a political and historical reckoning.

Recently, I came across Andrea Carter Brown’s poetry collection titled, September 12, released in 2021, her most recent book, along with two previous chapbooks and another collection titled, The Disheveled Bed, none of which I knew. I felt compelled to read this collection, to try to glean a better understanding of a first-person account of someone who had fled New York City in the immediate wake of the attacks on September 11. As the book is titled September 12, it seemed that the author was also aiming to take stock of the aftermath of the catastrophe. What does the day after an apocalyptic event bring? What’s the damage, the perspective, the prognosis for a person, a city, a civilization, an empire’s people?

Andrea Carter Brown opens with a simple paragraph about how she was alerted by her sister’s phone call to the first hit on the North Tower, while she was sitting and drinking coffee in her apartment in Battery Park City, just a block away at about 9 a.m. She immediately flees the scene and her journey to Staten Island through New Jersey and finally to upstate New York where she meets up with her husband Tom. This takes up the second section of the book, a lengthy prose poem in sections of astute observation, resilient emotions and stunning details. Like any refugee, she is dependent on luck, resources, the kindness of strangers and happenstance. There is no clearer demonstration of this than her parlous ride in the Staten Island Ferry which stalls halfway across the sound and is enveloped by a cloud of black smoke from the burning towers. Brown recounts how she nervously dons a donut shaped life-jacket and takes it off, twice, not knowing what will actually save her. Finally, after a kind Staten Island resident named Joyce takes her and a dozen or so survivors in, affording them clean clothes, internet and refreshment, Andrea is able to reach her husband and let him know she’s okay. She writes:

“All of Lower Manhattan dissolves in a scrim of gray dust. Rising, it rivers the sky as the wind carries it east, raining grit and papers on Brooklyn as far as the eye can see. On the western edge of the island, on landfill made from bedrock excavated to build the World Trade Center, I can just make out the apartment building where Tom and I live. It’s still standing. I don’t understand. How could those two skyscrapers, a hundred and ten stories each, fall down without destroying everything nearby? But there it is: our home.” (p 38).

The names of Jersey cities, including the one where Andrea grew up, fly by as though they are flags on a ski slalom course, as she is transported by a Port Authority pick up truck and finally arrives in a gas station at Larchmont, New York where she and her husband had planned to rendezvous. However, he is not there so Andrea waits and waits. Four days later, on September 15^th, escorted by the National Guard they are allowed to go home. She recounts:

“Flashlights on, dust masks positioned over nose and mouth, we walk through the lobby, up five flights of stairs, and down dark hallways reeking of spoiled food. Inside the apartment, dirty white dust covers everything. The dust contains ashes of the thousands who vanished four mornings ago: we know this without being told. The dead now lie in our home, now cover every surface. They coat silverware, the runners on which drawers open and close; they sleep in book bindings; they seep between pages and underneath volumes packed tight on shelves; they find corners of closets where we haven’t looked in years. Yes, the dead are with us, will always be with us. Our home has become theirs; we hesitate to disturb their final resting place. Leave them in peace, if there can be any. As for the living, I long to simply walk away, take nothing, and never come back.” (p 42)

The third section of the book, “The Rock in the Glen,” memorializes and specifies the victims from Andrea’s hometown of Glen Rock, NJ. Here she gives us poignant portraits of the ten residents of the town who on September 11^th, “go to work and never come home.” In a homage to Whitman, she writes: “Picture a breeze/ rustling the oaks and the maples, spreading/ the news of the morning of September 11./Picture a pretty town brought to its knees.” (p.46). Through these portraits, the ashen remains are transformed into very real people, people with family and community causes, people who played sports or who had retired, whose children, some of them, still expected their parent to return home after months or years of waiting.

The book opens with eight poems that are related to the Hudson River, the great river that graces and enchants Andrea as she lives in Battery Park City. Most of these are beautiful homages to other poets, like Constable and Apollinaire, Dubuffet and Ruscha. In “Each Boat Signs the Water.” She writes in the second stanza,

“I’ve watched the river two years now

I know the names of tugs, the ebb and flow

of tankers and barges, when the next

bright yellow banana boat

comes in. I’ve caught

at dawn an ocean

liner cruise

into port.” (p 24)

In these poems Brown captures the movement and history of the river, its importance in the founding of Manhattan and the way the waters’ reflexes determine her own mood and stance as well as the commerce of New York. Implied by this poet, who is also a birdwatcher and naturalist, is that the river rolls on – it predates and persists beyond the reckoning of shattered man-made metal and glass, the brutal massacre of human life of 9/11.

The fourth section of the book “To the Dust” begins with an epigraph from Charles Bukowski:

“what matters most is/how well you/walk through the/fire.” This is a fitting opening to a section that includes poems about ruined buildings brought back to life, about kid necklaces made on the day after, paeans to the varied ethnic laborers and characters that frequented the old neighborhood before the cataclysm, and more poems in the aftermath. It opens with a piece called, “The Kiss” in which Andrea’s husband remembers that he heard about the towers burning in a meeting and was sure that his wife was dead. His friend Andy takes him home and they watch TV to hear news, to figure out what happened. And he ends with “I was glad I had gone back to kiss you a second time before leaving. Do you remember that?” And then the poem turns to her story. “Did I hear your whispered I love you? I don’t know. I drifted back to sleep. Only late that night, September 11, when you ask, do your words come back, as in a dream.” (p 61)

There are two fragmented poems with columns that divide and connect each other: one called, “After the Disaster: Fragments” and the other a blunt ode to the Towers themselves, called, “Pinstriped Bullies,” that ends, “To live/in your/ shadow/was to feel/infinitesimal.” (p 73). In a poem titled “The Garden of Earthly Delights” – a homage to Bosch, Brown describes the trials her husband endures in the months following the attacks….”you waited in that stuffy acrid air/for someone to pick up the carpets/rolled up on our living room floor/since the morning of September 11./Those months doctors banned me/from going within two miles of the site,/you did everything. It took three years/to get the asthma I never had before/under control…” (p 81). In an “Ars Poetica” she writes: “Let’s not romanticize bodies/falling. Others may use float/or dance; I refuse to pretend/…Some screamed. The sound/they made landing? Forget/thud. Louder than the wind.” p. 83. And there is grace. In “This is for You” she gives thanks to all those who helped her and her husband during and after the crisis, a heartfelt tribute and testimony to the fact that no one can survive a catastrophe alone. This fourth part is a powerful section of the book: a poet wielding her full capacity at free verse to capture, in elegiac figures, the loss and realities of the devastation wrought by the 9/11 attacks.

September 12 ends with a fifth and final section called “The Present” with an epigraph from a swatch of London graffiti, “Every day is a gift, that’s why we call it the present.” Relocated to California, these poems shine with the domestic pleasures of cooking and gardening, of trips to Hawaii, of birds and snakes and reminders of what has transpired. In “To the WTC Health Registry” May 2020, Brown reports on the latest survey about 9/11’s health side-effects that arrives in the mail during the pandemic. In it the addressee is warned, “Call the 24/7 toll-free hotline should/flashbacks or raised heart rates/result at any point.” The survey goes on to ask about new cancers and PTSD, nightmares: “Still have trouble sleeping?” The poet ends this bureaucratic summons with “May it do some good./May some future survey/find us filling more spaces that say/Seldom/Almost Never/Not at All. (p 99)

The finale is a poem called, “Domestic Karma” which lists the daily objects of health and renewal, including lemons and tangerines and clothes lines of laundry dried by outdoor air. The author has been restored to an almost regular regimen. “Monday morning/again. May this ritual help us get/ through the week between tests/and results./May it bring/months of Mondays like this,/shirts loving sun on shoulders,/fear faded as favorite blue jeans/pinned to the line, socks ready/to take us wherever we want.” (p 103). There is ironic hope and a touch of glee in this ending – a sharp contrast to the terror and urgency of Brown’s fleeing blindly that morning from the furious heat and destruction nearby. To note, seventy of her neighbors never returned home after September 11^th. In the Afterword she states, “In truth, I was very lucky.” And there is more but I will let you read it. In truth, she was lucky, but she was also brave and instinctual in making a fast getaway and dealing with the displacement and damage of that day, for years to come.

This book is an amazing compendium of recollection and transformation. It is an important and singular chronicle of one woman’s survival and insight into the debacle of 9/11. It has remarkable structure, imagination, music and heart – a poetic and historical treasure. On this Fourth of July, 2022, it seems fitting that I recommend it to you. Read it.

Poem During the Plague: Poem 22

Lo Galluccio is a writer and vocalist whose published works include two chapbooks of poetry: Hot Rain on Ibbetson Street Press and Terrible Baubles on Alternating Current Press. In addition, her prose-poem memoir, Sarasota VII was published by Cervena Barva Press. She's been nominated four times for Pushcart prizes and served as Poet Populist of Cambridge between 2013-2015,  In July of 2019 she received an MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine. Her writer's site is www.logalluccio.weebly.com.  

The Home Situation

Dripping of water like fingers

stretching against the sky,

like bells, random and plain.

My dreams are so meddled with.

my mouth is dry and unlikely

to be met with another mouth now.

Still pieces of the universe

reward a pining heart, purses

full of anti-money and faith.

A dirty red curtain

swaths the situation and

defines the moment with bigger lips.

Bigger lips than mine

will kiss a stranger in this

time of quarantine.

We’re alone with our

dreams and we wake

startled by the piece-meal rain.

Stonecoast MFA Community Reading Nov 18th Arts Armory--Somerville

Reading hosted by Lo Galluccio

( Click on pic to enlarge)

Prayer: fix my set: Poems by Martha Boss

Prayer: fix my set

Oddball Publishing

Copyright 2016

44 pages

Poems by Martha Boss

Review by Lo Galluccio

The new book of poems by Martha Boss, recently released by Oddball Magazine Publishing, is truly a genius treat to read. Martha’s thinking and her pen are tightly bound so that you feel as though the ink on the page is her very own blood. But these are not poems inked in dry salty blood – their effect is more like cherry juice or a Manhattan cocktail. Martha seems loaded with brilliant insights about her own process of creating and the world around her. She eschews capital letters and uses an ampersand instead of “and.” Her book begins with this Whitmanesque declaration:

“i celebrate my pen.

keeper of protest & riot.”

And later in the poem she writes:

“my pen, desperate avatar

Of truth, translating

Crammed passion.”

Boss, a regular at Stone Soup on Monday nights, writes in free verse, her stanzas no set length and without rhyme schemes. Her own logic about things is jazz enough. In the title poem: Prayer: fix my set, she engages in a monologue to the Maker, in which she begs him to get the remote working and turn on the TV. This is quite entertaining until, at the end, she issues one more request:

“so

Where are you from. Anyway, God?

Give me a sign.

I’m praying.

I’m guessin’ radioshack, please.

Can you fix my set?” p 8

I love the idea that God is at radio-shack, hanging with the other employees in a uniform.

Poems about the movie, “The Ten Commandments,”

“hmm …now I’m thinking with my pen.”

Ends with “did God give the order to have Jesus killed?

Wassup with these guys?”

In a confessional poem about her own process she writes that she starts by drawing the sky every day and birds.

“I draw every day. Every day I draw

the sky. It’s usually indigo blue. It usually gets me past a bad memory. …& birds. I draw

birds.” P 12

In the playful poem “Cookie Man” Boss coyly feeds a flock of birds some fig newtons...identifying with the birds as they

“peck at one & then another & another like they’re seeing if they all taste the same

and they’re not sure what it is” p 26 

 

She notes from the box that they were made in Mexico which prompts Boss to finish the poem in Spanish:

“hay chica. esta la fantasma del galeta-hombre./el cookie-man esta viviendo en el arbol

y ahora we know eso es que pasa a los fig newtons.” P 27

Roughly translated, the cookie man is living in the tree and now we know that is what is happening with the fig newtons. 

 

In “I walk by the river of everything” Boss takes on a musing stance toward probably the Charles River in Cambridge –

“along the reedy banks/of high bio research/I am a single digit/wrapped tight in wool

some other/Ireland river. In a lyrical declarative voice she then sings: in spring we will

float/ our boats/the river of everything/will flow with experiment…and the waste of

ideas/have given it new data./the river moving the mystery/the unknowable genome/in

the undertow.”p 34

All the poems in this collection are good and riveting. In her plain-spoken eccentricity Martha Boss brings her own vision and life to the poetry she writes. There is a staccato feel to these pieces but then sometimes a well-spring of aria that extends the lines. It feels home-made and well spun, like plain funny and fantastic clothes you want to try on again and again. From the aluminum space suit to the cotton dress – all the birds she invokes—draws us into her mind’s resonance of language. I highly recommend checking out prayer: fix my set out.

Robert Creeley at the Wilderness House in Littleton, Mass.

 

 ** Shortly before his death I had the pleasure to spend an afternoon with Robert Creeley. The Wilderness House Literary Retreat founded by Steve Glines hosted him, and I happened to be on the board for the retreat. The retreat closed after a few years--but we had quite a few interesting guests like Lois Ames, Afaa Michael Weaver, and a number of others...



Robert Creeley at the Wilderness House in Littleton, Mass.

By Doug Holder

 

It is always exciting to help start a new literary venture. Steve Glines, the founder of the “Wilderness House Literary Retreat” in Littleton, Mass. asked me to be a founding board member last Summer, and finally on Dec. 11 2004 we had our first event. We managed to get the renowned poet Robert Creeley as our first guest. Lo Galluccio, a poet and a friend of mine, joined me and we caught a train out of Porter Square, Cambridge to the hinterlands of Littleton, Mass. Steve Glines met us there and ferried us up to the “New England Forestry Foundation” lodge where the first event was to be held. The actual hunting lodge, where the retreat will be housed hopefully by the late Summer of 2005, is currently being renovated. Later, we inspected the premises, and found it full of promise, not to mention a spectacular view of the nature preserve below.

Lo and I sat down in a spacious room in the NEFF lodge, and enjoyed the crackling fireplace. Creeley was the first to arrive and looked amazingly hale and hearty, and much younger than his 78 years.



The event was advertised as a “chat” with Creeley, and that’s exactly what it was, a “chat,” not a formal lecture. Creeley was free to ramble on about his fascinating career as a literary legend. He talked about the many poets he knew; his years at the experimental “Black Mountain College,” to his experience with Jazz greats such as Miles Davis, to name one illustrious figure.

Creeley who grew up in Acton, Mass. has strong connections to Littleton, the home of the retreat. As a kid he swam at Long Lake which is just down the road from the retreat. Creeley was surprised that the natural beauty of the area has been preserved. Creeley felt that he could now thumb his nose at neighboring Concord that always had a better literary pedigree than Acton and Littleton. Creeley, tongue firmly in his cheek stated; “ I am glad to thumb my nose at Concord.”

Creeley, who taught at the “ Black Mountain College“, which in the 1940’s and 50’s was an innovative avant-garde institution located in North Carolina. Folks like Merce Cunnigham, John Wieners, Robert Motherwell, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olsen, and others taught there or were students.

Creeley, who attended Harvard, was less than enthusiastic about the years he spent there. He stated: “ Harvard makes everyone feel like an outsider.” He said there was not a welcoming feeling there, and he felt inhibited to approach the formidable and often aloof professors. He said his literature professor at the time excluded the works of Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, much to his dismay.

Creeley told the audience that at first he wanted to be a prose writer. He laughed: “ I had a naïve sense of supporting a family writing a novel.” However, a publisher told him his novel was all about transitions; nothing ever happened. So Creeley decided to concentrate on Poetry.

Creeley had a plethora of anecdotes about poets he knew like: Allen Ginsberg and Anne Sexton. He recalled Sexton demanding a six-pack of beer before a reading she was to do in Buffalo, NY, that he organized. Ginsberg, commenting on the brevity of Creeley’s poems told him:” What a big book you wrote with such little poems.”

Creeley talked a bit bout his own poetry and process. Surprisingly he said he doesn’t make drafts of poems. If the poem doesn’t work he simply throws it away. He reminded the audience that writing poetry should be fun--not some solemn, painful process. He remembers William Carlos Williams saying “ Maybe we should tell them it’s fun.”

Creeley feels that poetry should be more about the act of “making,” than the final product. He rails against proponents of strict dogma regarding poetic form. He feels there can not be “set” rules for an art form we can not define.

The afternoon went quickly, as Creeley was as an engaging presence. The author Lois Ames was in the audience, and she and Creeley had a fascinating back and forth about Plath and Sexton, both of whom Ames has written extensively about.

Lo and I shook hands with the great man, and of course gave him a few “Ibbetson” books on our way out. We both thanked our lucky charms for this unique experience.

SARASOTA VII by Lo Galluccio

SARASOTA VII
Lo Galluccio
Cervena Barva Press
ISBN 978-0-615-26369-4
2008 $12.00

“the point is those of us who lose a reflection of ourselves
in childhood have two lives.”

by the sixth page of Sarasota VII, I was completely engrossed
by the writing, the story. this book identifies a universal struggle to love and be loved

“participating somehow in the darkness that scored against us, we owe something to evil in being reborn as we are: stranger, darker, with a craving for bright lights and blood. the mania, some mania, of death. isn’t greed at life a kind of death?”

in reading Sarasota VII I found myself trying to slow down, to be careful in my interpretations of what is being written. each sentence relates to the next, each vignette relates to the next, a going forward and an ability to trace back the myths, truths that impact the fullness of what Lo Galluccio brilliantly puts forth, makes visible.

“isn’t the real trick to disappear while remaining visible?” as I turn each page I think of how much courage it takes to write and not only write about ordinary circumstances but write as Lo Galluccio writes. the reader knows this is not just “another book,” this is the book to read and glean what it means to be a writer, to bare with the process, the uncovering, laying naked, page after page. I know I’ve used the word write, writer, more times than may be necessary, but this is what one of my teachers taught me, it takes courage to write.

“19

how does it intersect with place? when it hooks
us, into whose bucket do we go? are we thrown
back into another ocean until another love,
another death, another life catches us again?”

there are 29 numbered segments in the first part of the book. the numbers appear important in the space allotted to them and I agree, their presence lends to the whole, “a madness whose madness sprang from a penny.” and the relationship of the numbers to what is being said is important. in part II the same space and attention is paid to alphabetizing the strophes. then nearing the end of the book, in lower case, aa: to hh: leaves the reader with the actuality of time, space, a muse of sorts, an anticipation, the finality

“X

I’ve told you almost nothing specific or real about anything. isn’t that the charge? have I described one scene you could follow or trust? am I circling still? what, after all, happens to swirling masses, but they’re swallowed by something that’s marshaled the terrible force of its own gravity, its own substance? even if that substance is a trick. it’s awful to belong to the tribe of miracle seekers.”

Galluccio will leave you with reason, with the power of words, with all
it takes to place your trust in the story. Sarasota VII will be read many times and then after leaving it for awhile you will pick it up again.

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor Ibbetson Street Press
Poetry Editor Wilderness House Literary Review