Description

Whether in the title poem, spoken by those who lived longingly and vicariously through the famous missing aviator, or in Circus Fire, 1944, which intimately recounts a haunting New England tragedy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi uses her prodigious gifts of imagination and empathy to give voice to the hope and heartbreak of small-town America. In painstaking, vernacular verse, she conveys the ambitions and failings of a distraught populacein the edgy jazz portrait, Suite Billy Strayhorn, for example, or the enthralling, interwoven sequence, At the Adult Drive-In, which conveys, at once, a personal and communal corruption. Penetrating and compassionate, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart portrays, with a storyteller's arc, the troubled landscape of the left-behind.