Sky Open Again [Paperback]

Gian Lombardo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 14, 1997

Knowing full well that the vantage point influences the observer's perspective, Lombardo examines the incongruities, paradoxes and imperfections of daily life. Simple scenes, like a train stopping at a station or hitchhiking or registering at a hotel, are tapped for the mysteries and magic inherent in them. In this collection of prose poems, Lombardo takes the reader -- from the deserts of the Southwest to the familiar stone walls, forests and coastal islands of New England -- on a journey dedicated to discovering the richness of the imagination.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In these little prose poems, everyday events, ordinary phrases, and figures variously ominous and melancholy from the modern mythology - a door-to-door salesman sprinkling dirt on the carpet, a performer getting the hook, a border guard checking passports - converge, morph, and move forward with dreamlike logic, the dreamer being even asleep a humorist. -- Natalie Jacobson McCracken, Bostonia, Fall 1997

Knowing full well that the vantage point influences the observer's perspective, the powerful poetry of Gian Lombardo examines the incongruities, paradoxes and imperfections of daily life. Simple scenes, like a train stopping at a station or hitchhiking or registering at a hotel, are tapped for the mysteries and magic inherent in them. In this collection of prose poems, Lombardo takes the reader on a journey from the deserts of the Southwest to the familiar stone walls, forests and coastal islands of New England to discover the richness other imagination. If you only have time for one afternoon of poetry and prose, Sky Open Again is the recommended reading. -- Midwest Book Review

Lombardo combines the form of the novella and the substance of short little lines into a collection of ambitious prose poems in Sky Open Again. These surrealistic exercises ratchet the prose poem a notch higher, showing how it is possible to paint pictures in words that remind one of Magritte's painting of words in pictures. You approach each new offering the way you watch a magician. How did he do that? Can he do it again? -- Samuel Jay Keyser, Harvard Review, 1997

Lombardo shakes up the world of familiar language and presents us with a skewed version. Through his relentless focus on and experimentation with the physical, emotional, and linguistic landscapes, he has built an important and engaging world in Sky Open Again. -- Brian Henry, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Fall 1997

While these poems work together and collectively resonate to form a retroactive narrative, they also always force the reader to shift back from that narrative into an awareness of the language that composes it - that is, back and forth between the burnt world of the desert and the lush world of language. The result is an intense eddy of language, a substantially lyrical thing. -- Priscilla Sneff, Ploughshares, Fall 1997

About the Author

Gian Lombardo holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Trinity College (Hartford, CT) and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University. His poems, prose poems and translations have appeared in such magazines as The Prose Poem: An International Journal, The Iowa Review, Agni, lift, Talisman, Denver Quarterly and Mudfish. His first two books, Between Islands and Standing Room, were also published by Dolphin-Moon in 1984 and 1989, respectively. A chapbook, Before Arguable Answers, was published in lift #13 in 1993. He has taught prose poetry workshops at The New School for Social Research and at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Born in Hartford, he currently resides in Conway, Massachusetts, where he edits the magazine key satch(el), and futilely tends a small orchard against numerous varmints, chief among them porcupines.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Dolphin Moon Pr; 1 Ed edition (March 14, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0940475928
• ISBN-13: 978-0940475922
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,309,005 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gian Lombardo is Publisher-in-Residence in the Writing, Literature & Publishing Department at Emerson College, where he teaches courses on book and magazine publishing. Gian has had over 30 years of experience in a wide range of publishing environments -- trade, association, literary and consumer magazines as well as professional, literary and textbook publishing. He has provided these publishers with editing, design, production and project management services and consulting on a freelance basis. His clients have included Reed Business Information, Ploughshares, Agni, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston Society of Civil Engineers and Transitions Abroad. He is also the author of Between Islands, a collection of poems and verse translations (Dolphin-Moon Press, 1984); and five collections of prose poetry -- Standing Room, Sky Open Again (Dolphin-Moon Press, 1989 & 1997), Of All the Corners to Forget (Meeting Eyes Bindery, 2004), Aid & A_Bet (BlazeVOX [books], 2008) and Who Lets Go First (Swamp Press, 2010). His translations include first half of Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la nuit, Eugène Savitzkaya's Rules of Solitude, Michel Delville's Third Body and Archestratos's Gastrology or Life of Pleasure or Study of the Belly or Inquiry Into Dinner. He serves as Contributing Editor for Sentence, a literary journal. Gian also directs Quale Press, which publishes literary works. He has a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Trinity College and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University.