Shattered Hours - Softcover

LaFemina, Gerry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1881168093 ISBN 13: 9781881168096

Publisher: Red Dancefloor Pr, 1997

Synopsis

In Shattered Hours Gerry LaFemina creates a mosaic of America fusing fragments of broken histories, biographies, and cultural artifacts into a startling landscape of the late twentieth century. Chronicled in poems of verbal control and formal inventiveness and populated by personas both famous and obscure, this America is a place of "rock-n-roll, diners, [and] cars big enough for lovemaking / and rebellion" as well as "pan handlers, airplanes, [and] desire./ Always desire." It is this longing that is the central theme of the book a fitting collection for the millennium's end.

About this title

From the Publisher

A current ArtServe Michigan grantee and the former recipient of a Gilmore Emerging Artists fellowship, Gerry LaFemina is the author of 23 Below and A Print of Wildflowers: Love Poems and is the editor of the nationally renown journal Controlled Burn. The former frontman for punk and ska bands, he now uses that energy and experience in the classrooms of Kirtland Community College in Northern Michigan where he directs the only Associates in Fine Arts Creative Writing program in the country.

Review

LaFemina's work is grounded in this world and full of tenderness and compassion toward all of the awkward things and people who lurch through life here his affection and humor are in every line of these poems -- Jean Valentine

The poem as a psalm or thank you is perhaps out of fashion. . . But LaFemina has written a book whose gratitudes, even in the midst of our suffering and confusion, rings brightly as a bell. His poems are skillful, heartfelt, funny and accurate -- William Matthews

What an interesting free-ranging wide-angle collection this is! In poem after poem LaFemina flies us in widening circles beyond his opening images, through sequences of vivid mysteries dangerously far, it seems and then returns us, transformed. The poems enlighten and delight memory, hope, Charlie Chaplin, tattoo parlors, jazz, rock, wild turkeys, a saved ball of aluminum foil. Like Whitman, LaFemina contains multitudes. "A squadron of paper takes flight," one poem tells us. This book is a flying circus, a skyfull of airlines. Read it -- Richard Frost

About this edition

• Publisher: Red Dancefloor Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1881168093
• ISBN 13: 9781881168096
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112