Thursday, October 10, 2019

The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart by Gabrielle Calvocoressi


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.




the author's website: http://gabriellecalvocoressi.com/

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