Honeyvoiced - Softcover

Jordi Alonso

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880977370 ISBN 13: 9781880977378

Publisher: XOXOX Press, 2014

HoneyVoiced, which is poet Jordi Alonso's first book, comprises poems inspired by the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Attracted to the sensuality of her work and her food imagery, Jordi made use of those characteristic themes in his own poems, constructing a long series of short poems based on her recovered fragments. To understand Sappho as clearly as possible, Jordi taught himself ancient Greek. (His embrace of languages began with a bilingual Spanish-English childhood and fluency in French. He has also studied Latin and Anglo-Saxon.) Sappho's fragments are not Jordi Alonso's only influence. He cites American poets H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Billy Collins, and Melissa Stein as others who shaped his poetic interests.

About the Author:

Cincinnati native Jordi Alonso is a 2014 graduate of Kenyon College, where he majored in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis. HoneyVoiced, which is Jordi's first book, comprises poems inspired by the ancient Greek poet Sappho. He attended the 2013 Southampton Writers Conference for a poetry workshop with Heather McHugh, and also took a poetry workshop with Billy Collins at the 2012 Writers Conference. Jordi has published poems in the Portland Review, Pegasus, the Southampton Review, Dovetails, The Lyric, Mountain Gazette, and NEAT Magazine, as well as in the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project. He is currently living on Long Island, New York, pursuing an MFA at Stony Brook Southampton University, where was named the Creative Writing Program s First Turner Fellowship Winner.

Review:

Alonso's fragments teach again how metonymy's magic wand transposes us fully into what a poem makes possible: how the single, rendered image suggests the lush world; how desire for others reminds us of the balm and thrill that philia and eros promise. Let us remember that Cupid's quiver was full of exclamation points. Let us remember that the Aegean invented the color blue. Alonso's poems remind us to care hardest about that which is most important: fellowship, love, food, desire, memory, the distinction between the part and the whole. His book is a time machine. Welcome to ancient Greece. --Tyler Meier, Executive Director of the Arizona Poetry Center

Jordi Alonso has given us a version of Sappho in English as clean as Federico García Lorca's version of Arabic poetry into Spanish: impeccably clean, each word a goldsmith gem yet flowing like the Guadalquivir River. In Jordi the words glitter as they should like Sappho's Pleiades, which after the moon and stars create the solitary intensity of palpable longing. Jordi Alonso's Sappho-inspired poems are confident works of art. --Willis Barnstone, author of SAPPHO, A NEW TRANSLATION

Since Jordi Alonso's poems are called fragments, my mind first leapt to Eliot, and the shoring against ruins. But the leap was precipitous. These rich and wonderful fragments are not bulwarks against anything, neither defensive nor resigned. They are loud, exuberant, rapacious love songs, sung by a fully-realized poet. The lines break where lyrics would. Cole Porter's, for instance. The words, so naturally right, each poem seems easy, a tune hummed on a walk. But it takes long brooding to produce work this good. That Alonso has achieved so much so early in his career makes one want to gasp. So I did, after which I sat back, closed my eyes, and gladly vanished in the music. --Roger Rosenblatt, author of THE BOOK OF LOVE and UNLESS IT MOVES THE HUMAN HEART

• Publisher: XOXOX Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1880977370
• ISBN 13: 9781880977378
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 140
• Editor: Jerry Kelly
• Illustrator: Jenaye Hill