Gabrielle Calvocoressi

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. “