Apocalyptic Swing, by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
(Persia Books, September 2009)
Amanda Brant
Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s second book of poems, Apocalyptic Swing, resonates with a quiet intensity. Issues of the body, love and sex, of fighting and falling and yet rising again because there is no choice flow through this collection involving a boxer who is caught up in the fight and world that exists around it in a small American town.
One time you hit a guy so hard
even he looked impressed before he fell
to the mat and started to seize.
She didn’t let you touch her for daysafter that.
Calvocoressi works from within the ring, as poems become the victor, loser, referee, someone shouting from the crowd. Small town concerns take precedence, become all that matter. These poems are the lights, the sweat shining on the floor after, evidence of what’s left. Apocalyptic Swing holds a sense of struggle, fight and courage and power, combined with a profound feeling of loneliness that plays part, even as an entire community’s inhabitants become a single entity of pride, anticipating something better.
These poems draw on people who are struggling to survive, whether in the ring or in their everyday lives. The boxer is any one of them, and he becomes the whole town, which could be any town, and they are all fighting, deserving to win, but usually walking away broken, beaten.
A sad history of short-lived triumph shifts through, coupled with hope. This time will be better:
It will feel better than any floor
that’s risen up to meet you. It will riselike Easter bread, golden and familiar
in your grandmother’s hands. She’ll come back,heaven having been too far from home
to hold her. O it will be beautiful.
Calvocoressi’s language is controlled with a confident, relaxed tone of honesty that quietly tells of a town and its people, one story, one memory at a time. Her poems take the hit, get back up, train for the next fight, keep going. Family and community encircle, push the importance of effort and love into the face, wrap it up between the knuckles, prepare for the punches. Small wars, small fires move from mouth to mouth, family to friend, keeping everyone warm, and relying on the chain to prevail, to stay lit, to stay alive. There is the fight and what’s worth fighting for—there cannot be one without the other.
Amanda Brant is a current MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She is originally from Indiana but now lives in Pittsburgh’s Southside with her dog, Maddie. Her work has recently appeared in Invisible City.