Rocket Fantastic: Poems

Calvocoressi resists the limitations of language--especially where gender is concerned--to more fully capture the experience of a self "unlimited in its possibilities." 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." 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."
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
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.