Apocalyptic Swing
Gabrielle Calvocoressi

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

Battered but never beaten, this narrator finds salvation in ecstatic communion with the gods of jazz and especially boxing: “O Tommy Hearns, O blood come down,” she prays. “Find your way to Hungerford where my/father glowers over me. Show him/how the bag does penance.” In such prayers she finds the strength to survive the home she has to leave and, once she does, the strength to face the fires she finds flaring the country over, from Los Angeles to Laramie. Apocalyptic Swing is a work of unbelievable force, a devastating and glorious testimony about America―its lore, disappointments, and promise.

“Calvocoressi is a daring act as a poet/athlete. . . Her wild lyrics shudder and shine, jubilant and threatening, exuberant.”
—Carol Muske-Dukes, The Huffington Post

“Muscular and musical, this second collection from Calvocoressi combines boxing, Elvis, church burnings, sex and horses to produce a book that is pure Americana. . . . This is a compelling sophomore effort from a very promising poet.”
—Publishers Weekly

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of Rocket Fantastic and The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review, and the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She is Editor at Large for Los Angeles Review of Books and Assistant Professor and Walker Percy Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $16.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-412-6 / 96 pages / Poetry

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