Carolyn Guinzio
Carolyn Guinzio was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. She earned her BA at Columbia College Chicago and MFA from Bard College in New York. She has received awards from the Arts Councils of Illinois and Kentucky, the Fund for Poetry, and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Blackbird, Colorado Review, Puerto Del Sol, Smartish Pace, and New American Writing. Her first book, West Pullman, won the 2004 Bordighera Poetry Prize and appeared in an English/Italian edition. Her second book is Quarry (Parlor Press, 2008). Spoke & Dark, her third book, is the winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s To the Lighthouse Publication Prize. She lives with her husband, Davis McCombs, and their children, Warren and Charlotte, in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
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All Books
Spoke & Dark
Carolyn Guinzio
Publication Date: September 1, 2012
$17.95 Tradepaper
ISBN: 978-1-59709-229-6
Description:
There is no word for the place between the dying hand and the living hand that holds it, but there is a space between those hands. Spoke & Dark dwells there, in the tensions that inhere between one thing & another: lost & found, future & past, life & afterlife. Using typographical symbols (#, /, and especially &) to delineate these phantom spaces, Spoke & Dark explores the wild fluctuations in the nature of the known, searching for a language for the unknowable.
Praise for Spoke & Dark:
“Proposal: the humblest part of speech as a principle of cognition. As in the and, the one thing and another. As in the mortal paradox: here and gone. As in the newborn’s foundational gaze, when ‘face seeks / face to fix upon.’ Carolyn Guinzio is far too savvy a writer to make her case with circumstantial detail, the plausible gestures of auto- or allo-biography. She is after recognition of a far more essential, far more demanding sort. And, thrillingly, this is exactly what she achieves, in a book as beautifully crafted and stirringly intelligent as any I have read in a very, very long time. These are brilliant, heartening, necessary poems.”—Linda Gregerson, 2007 National Book Award Finalist, author of Waterborne
“Here is poetry surefooted and supple, ‘wild and delicate/both, how strange.’ A good solid strangeness at the core; a command of pivotal shifts in tonality, guiding the pacing of these poems; an intuitive, understatedly dramatic way of bringing a poem to a close, one that does not cinch or bind (‘the best part is the end, that incidental/silence that shows the rest for what it was.’)–all contribute to a collection that summons up the deep pleasures and rewards of the poetry of Basil Bunting and Lorine Niedecker. A remarkable and startling collection.”—Alice Quinn