"Save Me Joe Louis"
from Gabrielle Calvocoressi's
The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart

Gabrielle Calvocoressi:

Gabrielle Calvocoressi grew up in central Connecticut. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including The New England Review, Ninth Letter, and The Paris Review (from which she received the Bernard F. Connors Prize for the long poem). A recipient of the Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, she has been both a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. She lives in Berkeley, California. (Photo by Brigitte Grignet)

About The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart:

"In Gabrielle Calvocoressi's bracingly intelligent debut collection, the voices of the 20th century chorus a darkly American legacy: here are the ordinary wounded, the disappointed, the casual witnesses, the suffering dead of circus fires and industrial toxins, the survivors of ruined little towns after the mines and factories shut down, the huge bodies on the screen of the 'adult drive-in' looming over the field and the highway. Formally alert, both compassionate and achingly observant, this is a book of remarkable maturity and power."
— Mark Doty

"These poems, with their surprising mix of lyric rigor and unswerving realism, make a powerful claim on the reader. Here are small towns, dark images, lost lives and found memories, all brought into existence by an unsettling music. This is the first book of a wonderfully talented poet."
— Eavan Boland

"Gabrielle Calvocoressi's 'Circus Fire' cycle (at the very heart of this amazing book) is nothing short of a feat of nature – nature gone wrong, a story husked by fear and flame, a freak devastation, but rendered with zero Sentimentia, relentless and simply hewn. There is no accident in this book, not a glimmer of excess. The only extravagances here are the clarity of Calvocoressi's wayward way, her lucidity of heart, the gifts of her fine, disquieting, distilled imagination."
— Lucie Brock-Broido

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