Azimuth: Poems (Color Edition)

FULL-COLOR ILLUSTRATED EDITION

with art by Beatriz Abluquerque

PRAISE FOR AZIMUTH

"If there is a little extra light at the edge of seeing, it is surely captured by these diversiform universes. Azimuth is illumined and illuminated by its relationship to the art and philosophy of the Italian Renaissance; a keen chiaroscuro suffuses these poems, creating marvelous contrasts of celebration and sadness. 'A light diffused makes the darkness stronger,' writes Ciavonne, and 'fire is brightest at the top of the tongue'."

–D. A. Powell, poet, Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys: poems, and the poetry trilogy: Tea, Lunch and Cocktails

"Via poems that take place at the partial vantage point of Azimuth, Quadrant and Meridian, the poet makes camp in the foreign, where 'to recognize and to be a stranger' find shared roots. Azimuth takes direction from fire, which demonstrates 'how to go forward /thinking of/ burning as a direction…' Accompanied by theologians she loves but cannot believe, Ciavonne’s urgent quest explores the physics of human separation, a separation, remarkably, which gives us insight to the condition of God, 'if god is an opening, if god is a divine withdrawal.'"

–Claudia Keelan, poet, O, Heart: poems and Missing Her: poetry and prose

"'She wears her best dress and she’s hired' describes not a poet but a mourner, but maybe it is the poet, in Carol Ciavonne’s new book Azimuth. The ways, the directions possible in language are the troubling engagements of this book in which a line might – for instance, 'Not speaking is foreign; the tongue is bronzed' – which is destined to stay with the reader, to nestle in the mind like a pet or a pest forever. The ways this book is beautiful are the same as the ways it is troubling. This is writing as a new necessity."

–Bin Ramke, editor, The Denver Quarterly, and poet, Theory of Mind: New and Selected Poems

Carol Ciavonne's poetry is both lyrical and experimental and has been noted for its visual imagery. Poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing and How2, among other journals. She was the recipient of the PSA Lyric Poetry Prize in 2004. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Poetry Flash, Xantippe, and Pleiades. She was selected as a workshop participant at the New York Center for Book Arts in 2007, and was a writer in residence at the Pécs Writers Program in Pécs, Hungary, in 2013. She recently published, along with artist Susana Amundaraín, an art/poetry dialogue (Birdhouse Dialogues, LaFi 2013). Ciavonne has also collaborated with Amundaraín on several theater pieces, and has worked with the innovative Imaginists theater collective. Ciavonne has a B.A. in Art, and an M.A. in Poetics from New College of California. She lives in Santa Rosa, California.