West Pullman (Bordighera Poetry Prize) [Paperback]

Carolyn Guinzio (Author)

Book Description

Series: Bordighera Poetry Prize | Publication Date: January 1, 2005

Poetry. Translated from the English into the Italian by Franco Nasi. Carolyn Guinzio writes moving poems of great delicacy, balancing opposites and adjacents at once. She also writes a kind of sentence that switches mid-run like a train on its tracks, re-casting its syntax without so much as a how-do-you-do. Through the curtain of birds and insects, or the scrim made of the lives of unadorned citizens, she allows us to 'press so close to the unfamiliar' without making it any less strange. This is a gifted poet's first book"--Susan Wheeler. Guinzio's work has appeared in Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, New American Writing, Octopus and Willow Springs among other venues. Franco Nasi teaches Italian Contemporary Literature at the University of Modena.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"Nothing ever travels more / than half-way away," are lines in Carolyn Guinzio's wonderful first book. The tug away and toward one's place is at the center of this volume, the "musty nativity" that one carries through life like a muse. The farther away you get from "the old women ambling to mass / in babushkas and black wool coats," the more the insistent they become. These poems are rooted in the ethereal grit of the actual but also reach astonishingly into that beauty Wallace Stevens called the real--a world made fresh by imagination: "We are meant to see / into the water, / into the sky between leaves. / These were two of our many / blue things. Spiders / fatten, listening / with their feet."

-Paul Hoover

The career of sunlight is complex and astonishing. 'A finch on a thistle turns the dome/of its eye,' as Guinzio observes and then, astonishingly, pursues through numberless refractions, unprecedented spectra. Seldom is the prism of straightforwardness so fine, so furthering as here. WEST PULLMAN shows colors I had only hoped to dream.

--Donald Revell

  Carolyn Guinzio writes moving poems of great delicacy, balancing opposites and adjacents at once.  She also writes a kind of sentence that switches mid-run like a train on its tracks, re-casting its syntax without so much as a how-do-you-do.  Through the curtain of birds and insects, or the scrim made of the lives of unadorned citizens, she allows us to "press so close to the unfamiliar" without making it any less strange.  This is a gifted poet’s gifted first book.

--Susan Wheeler         

About the Author

Carolyn Guinzio is the author of one previous collection of poems, WEST PULLMAN, winner of the 2004 Bordighera Poetry Prize. A Chicago native, she received a BA from Columbia College and an MFA from Bard College. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Colorado Review, DENVER QUARTERLY, 42 Opus, Indiana Review, NEW AMERICAN WRITING, and many other journals. She has received awards from the arts councils of Kentucky and Illinois and now lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Product Details

• Paperback: 105 pages
• Publisher: Bordighera Press (January 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1884419704
• ISBN-13: 978-1884419706
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,986,510 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully Wrought, November 5, 2005

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This review is from: West Pullman (Bordighera Poetry Prize) (Paperback)

In West Pullman, Guinzio has written a marvelous book of poems intimately tied to a specific place (the neighborhood of West Pullman, Chicago's south side) yet broadening to include a series of poems on Pacific island birds. The glue that binds the poems together is that they all ask the universal question: "What is it / to be in the world?" Guinzio doesn't provide any easy answers. In fact, these poems are as much about listening as they are about answering that question. One poem implores, "Tell / your story, the great story of one / and many, composed of an imperfect / moment of silence." We are all ultimately alone in this world, but these poems offer solace in the fact that the poet is listening and recording.

Guinzio's poems are embedded with the intricate, daily details of our lives, yet they rise to a lyric pitch that is at once beautiful and intense and built on "words that have become / like breath." -- A splendid debut, with more to come in the future, I hope.