Talk: 1 (Bordighera Press Prize) - Softcover

Cariello, Matthew M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1599541394 ISBN 13: 9781599541396

Publisher: Bordighera Press, 2019

Synopsis

Winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize-The Lauria/Frasca Prize promotes the poetry of the Italian diaspora in English.

About this title

Review:

“What a pleasure it is to read these unadorned yet carefully observed poems by Matthew Cariello. Talk wages a lyrical conversation with the self, the everyday, and the natural world where hard-won realizations are in perfect balance with a nature that becomes primal because it is so effortlessly welcomed. There are no easy epiphanies, or grandiose posturing here, instead we gain insight from an integrated narrative impulse that subtly engages and delights. The birch tree, the fig trees, pigeons, and swallows, a walk to a delicatessen, trips to an old bookstore, and even an otherworldly shovel emerge as emblems without sacrificing their utility and order in the poet’s refined imaginary.”

—Peter Covino

“Readers will find themselves returning to Cariello’s poems for many helpings.”

—Pegi Deitz Shea, author of The Whispering Cloth: A Refugee’s Story

“The poems in Talk offer mosaics of syntax: precise, evocative, and seemingly lit from within. Matthew Cariello displays the names in the corners of rooms, local words, phrases from memory. This is a collection of poems rich with affection, clarity, and talent.”

—Stephen Kuusisto

“You will recognize Matt Cariello as a true poet when you find yourself enchanted by a phrase or line, then another and another, each one crystalline. Swallows in this book are like ‘bullets with love for their target.’ A mockingbird’s song repeats ‘I don’t believe I will die.’ A jellyfish is a string of things lined up: ‘my venomous balloon/ holy water/ radiant stone/ lidless eye, moon, blood.’ Cariello possesses Neruda’s pleasure in things, an explorer’s eye, a taste for ordinary life. A boy climbs a tree. A little girl dies and her parents drive home without her body. A poet asks, ‘if this life is a dream, why do I drink so much wine?’”

—Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light

About this edition

• Publisher: Bordighera Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1599541394
• ISBN 13: 9781599541396
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 94