Rocket Fantastic: Poems

by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Overview

Now in paperback, a spellbinding reinvention and exploration of self, gender, and family.

Like nothing before it, in Rocket Fantastic explores the landscape and language of the body in interconnected poems that entwine a fabular past with an iridescent future by blurring, with disarming vulnerability, the real and the imaginary. Sorcerous, jazz-tinged, erotic, and wide-eyed, this is a pioneering work by a space-age balladeer.

“A dance of self-discovery, subverting our assumptions of gender and the body. . . Both innovative and sensual, Rocket Fantastic is a vital book for our time.”—Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892554928
Publisher:	Persea Books
Publication date:	09/18/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	673,676
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of Apocalyptic Swing, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, and Rocket Fantastic. She is Associate Professor and Walker Percy Fellow in Poetry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an editor-at-large for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

A Note for the Reader xi

Shave 3

[There's a point where it all gets still] 4

The Sun Got All Over Everything 7

[I remember Dad would tell us the story of Isaac] 9

[$'s huge. Standing there in the woods] 10

Major General 13

Let yourself get loose and double 15

Achingly Beautiful How the Sky Blooms Umber at the End of the Day, Through the Canopy 18

[Locked away we're like a Russian novel] 19

[It's not all bad, I mean we laugh out here] 22

[I like it when $ touches me there, right above the forehead] 23

[Out here it's okay to be nothing] 25

In a Landscape of Perpetual Springtime 26

She Ties My Bow Tie 28

[The Bandleader calls it the Angel Position] 29

[Dad and I, we once went up to the mountains] 32

Major General 33

[Falcon in the trees, bobcat in the grasses] 35

Fox 39

Major General 41

[$'s really beautiful. When $'s standing in the trees] 43

[If I wait long enough I'll hear them nesting] 45

I Had a Mane Once 46

[I was on all fours] 47

The Good Guy's Got No Chance, It's Sad 50

[$'s really beautiful when $ thinks no one is looking] 51

Major General 53

[I like it when $ touches me there,] 55

[$ said, I want you in my mouth,] 56

[T. says it's fine because they don't understand the things we're saying.] 58

Major General 59

Some Thoughts on Building the Atom Bomb 61

[I like the twang and sometimes we can hear it on the radio] 63

Four Long Years At Court 64

Null Point 69

Dry Season at the End of the Empire 70

Major General 71

[I like to watch whose start to want things] 72

[It's a long way to go to get away] 74

"I was popular in certain circles" 75

[Some kids killed a goat and cooked him in the ground] 77

[You can hold a duck down on a rock and cut its head off] 79

*

In the Darkness of the House of Pleasure 83

Who Holds The Stag's Head Gets to Speak 88

Praise House: The New Economy 89

[The paint chipped away on the wall looked like the bull] 91

Editorial Reviews

"A vertiginous, wondering, painful, uncannily and deeply sexy book: Rocket Fantastic offers an arresting array of characters, escapees from the loneliest country song and swivellers to a wild jazz. This is an original American poetry in tune with the oldest myths and the latest wounds... It is as if we have entered the green wood of traditional balladry- that charged, liminal space of encounter- without ever leaving a late twentieth/early twenty-first century America of war, debt, precarity, barbecues, radios, and guns. The humor, tenderness, rawness, gorgeous care and beauty here seem to me a new thing, a perfectly judged, mournful and joyful shimmering surprise."

MAUREEN N. MCLANE

"Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s third collection, Rocket Fantastic, is a beautiful book which asks the reader to live in a world where gender and language are both fluid and linked together in a dance which swings, sways, and surprises at every turn."

The Rumpus

"Gabrielle Calvocoressi's Rocket Fantastic is a mythic, personal journey through an inner constellation of self-discovery– a lyrical celebration that blends animal and insect into luminous landscape and lover-laced bow ties. This poet pivots between the sublime thicket of the sensual and the violence of the hunt in this pinpoint navigation of family, memory, and shine. Strap in. Stray not. Let yourself get loose and double on this riveting raft of poems, and you just might find a way home."

TYEHIMBA JESS

07/17/2017
Calvocoressi (Apocalyptic Swing) resists the limitations of language—especially where gender is concerned—to more fully capture the experience of a self “unlimited in its possibilities.” (To announce the repeated manifestations of her recurring character the Bandleader, Calvocoressi uses the musical segno symbol, signifying a “confluence of genders in varying degrees, not either/or nor necessarily both in equal measure.”) The setting of her third collection is woodsy, nocturnal, and by turns sinister and merciful; where “it did get dark” enough to see the stars “but how bright it was.” Various animals populate the mountains, grasses, and trees: deer, falcons, bobcats, and foxes. “And yes,” the speaker in “I Had a Mane Once” reminds readers, “I was every inch an animal.” A range of characters compose a makeshift cast—or family—fluid enough to include a hermit, a cowboy, and a dowager. These poems balance wildness and control in a fearless treatment of eros, identity, trauma, and all that resists easy categorization. The voice encompasses the colloquial as well as the high lyrical: “Oak leaves so full of late summer// sun even I thought, Obscene, and stood stunned/ for a moment.” When particular forms aren’t up to the task of rendering something with tender and unflinching attentiveness, Calvocoressi reaches outside of poetry altogether: “Oh. It. Was. Beautiful. No metaphor will do.” (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Gabrielle Calvocoressi is one of those writers I love so much that I look at bookstores' shelves hoping she's written a new book. Now she has, and the pleasure of these new poems about gender, God, loss, joy, politics, love and the struggle for meaning in language and in this difficult moment in the United States are all here for us– and we're richer for it. Go find what's lush, what's troublesome, what's an invitation to your own path in this magnificent new collection."

REBECCA SOLNIT

08/01/2017
In this follow-up to Apocalyptic Swing, a finalist for the Los Angeles Time Book Award, queer lesbian poet Calvocoressi uses the Dal Segno, a musical symbol directing the player to return to an earlier spot in the score, as a pronoun embodying "a confluence of genders" when referencing the Bandleader. There's a sense that the speaker wants to return to an earlier time, too, a throwback feel to the pastoral scenes she sets and a need to shuck convention. The speaker and the Bandleader meet in a series of poems strung throughout this thought-provoking collection, and the use of the Dal Segno immediately strips away expectation, making the focus on the acts of looking and touching rather than body parts interacting conventionally. The resulting escalating eroticism and uneasy tension are something like the "tightness/ in my back" that the speaker allows to "open where my wings would/ be" before turning from sun-slicked girls at a pool and declaring memorably, "Somewhere my mother was dying/ and someone was skinning a giraffe./ And I let it go. I just let it go." VERDICT Occasionally meandering but capable of some real surprises: "You haven't lived until a fox/ has whispered something the ferns told him/ in your one good ear."

Library Journal