Gabrielle Calvocoressi is a Connecticut-raised poet who currently lives in Berkeley, California. She has worked as a lecturer for Stanford University, where she won both a prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry and a Jones Lectureship. Her other major prizes include a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers and, for her long poem “Circus Fire, 1944”, a Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review.<\/i><\/p>\n
“Circus Fire, 1944” is the centerpiece of her first book of poetry, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart<\/i>. Published by Persea Books, The Last Time …<\/i> includes poems that previously appeared in publications such as New England Review, Ninth Letter, Western Humanities Review<\/i>, and of course The Paris Review<\/i>.<\/p>\n
The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart<\/i> focuses on the ominous shadows of small-town life in America’s heartlands in the mid-20th Century. The title poem speculates about what Amelia Earhart’s disappearance might have meant to her crew, husband, and to everyday people who simply saw her as a celebrity. Her Conners Prize-winning poem explores the horror and tragedy of the July 6, 1944 fire that killed 168 people, mostly children, under the big tent at a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus performance in Hartford, Connecticut. Other poems explore the economic, environmental, and social damage done to towns through mining and industrial exploitation.<\/p>\n
Calvocoressi’s poetry is dark, vivid, and starkly beautiful, sprinkled throughout with images of coal dust, fire, and birds.If you enjoy horror or dark fantasy poetry, I think you’ll really enjoy her work.<\/p>\n
According to Ms. Calvocoressi, her work has been influenced strongly by poets such as Lucie Brock-Broido, Eavan Boland, Marie Howe, and Michael Klein.<\/p>\n
Ms. Calvocoressi really ought to have a website, but she doesn’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"