UNKNOWN

Gary Percesepe's new poetry collection The Girl of My Dream takes its title from the opening pages of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time: "Little by little the memory of her would fade, I had forgotten the girl of my dream." Like a bite of the fabled Proustian madeleine, the reader is drawn into reverie, a dreamscape of places, names, scents, and laments for lost time, both its illusions and rewards.

The book is anchored by an off-kilter story of an encounter between a film student and a cop in rural Illinois at the scene of a wreck. Tipped is an unlikely and at times hilarious clash of perspectives which nevertheless merge into the same lane with two sleeves of art and an unexpected visit by Italian film star Sophia Loren.

At the heart of the book is a floating reverie of sadness and grief remembered that takes us from Trieste to New York City painted gray on gray in the temporal space of November-years of November.

Readers explore literary "tips of the hat" to writers as different as Proust, Kerouac, and Cheever, prose poems alongside villanelles and haiku in search of the forgotten girl of the dream.

"Poems simultaneously street-smart and softly lyrical, they sing the hard-edges of love's brief rapture... Percesepe announces himself as our twentieth century O'Hara ~ Kara Candito, author of Taste of Cherry and Spectator