On Joy, History, and the Occasional Poem

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of Apocalyptic Swing, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, and Rocket Fantastic. She is the senior poetry editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. In her collection Rocket Fantastic (Persea) Calvocoressi blurs the real and the imaginary as she reinvents the landscape and language of the body in interconnected poems. Sorcerous, jazz-tinged, erotic, and wide-eyed, this is a pioneering work, a reinvention of self, family, and gender by a space-age balladeer. In its review, Library Journal observed that “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. “

Nikky Finney is the author of five books of poetry, including Head Off & Split, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. She is the Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina and currently serves as an ambassador for the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Art for Justice Project. Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry (Triquarterly) is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. This collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts—copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, a new language of “docu-poetry.” Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day. Publishers Weekly’s starred review noted that “Finney’s skillful, sweeping epic ambitiously connects personal and public history.”

Ross Gay is the author of several poetry collections including Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens (with Aimee Nezhukumatathil), River  (with Rose Wehrenberg), Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and the essay collection The Book of Delights. Ross Gay’s Be Holding (University of Pittsburgh Press) is a love song to basketball player Julius Erving— the legendary Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Gay connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might bring us closer to each other. Poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine called it “At once record, collage, group photograph, dance, and archive, Be Holding reveals a multifaceted intimacy and lyricism within the history of a game, tracing how this history is interconnected with the saga of our country.”