The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart by Gabrielle
Calvocoressi is a collection of poems about spectacle and disappearance largely
in rural American life (specifically mining and factory towns), and, sometimes,
the queerness in these spaces. The collection begins with a series of persona
poems about the last time individuals from her town, her life, and her team saw
Amelia Earhart. The speakers include Earhart’s husband, a housewife, a school
teacher, a flight mechanic, and bystanders. Another series of poems is threaded
throughout the collection, “From the Adult Drive-in”, are also persona poems
written in the voices of the various viewers of the adult films, many of them
including lesbian encounters between actors. There are a series of poems about
a “Circus Fire, 1944” including poems in the voices of attendees, workers,
performers, the coroner, an abandoned child and even the arsonist himself. The
collection interrupts itself, here, with the poem “Backdrop” in which the poet
claims that all of these things “never existed” – not the town, the fire, the
films, even parts of the speaker themselves. The book closes with a series of
poems about the death of Margaret Fuller, a 19th Century feminist
scholar and transcendentalist, who was lost in a shipwreck off the coast of New
York – her body and the body of her husband were never recovered. There are no
notes on the research for the collection, but most of the poems are titled
using the names of their speakers and dates and locations are often provided as
well.
Read poems from the book here: https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/462/circus-fire-1944-gabrielle-calvocoressi
the author's website: http://gabriellecalvocoressi.com/
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