Rocket Fantastic
Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Winner of the 2018 Audre Lorde Award
for Lesbian Poetry from the Publishing Triangle

Like nothing before it, Rocket Fantastic transfigures the landscape and language of gender and the body. Its poems are populated by figures both familial and fabular: a prodigal brother and a relentless father; the Hermit, Dowager, and Major General; and, perhaps most strikingly, the Bandleader, embodiment of sexual, capitalistic, and political dominance. Mythic and musical, erogenous yet wide-eyed, this is a dazzling book by a space-age troubadour of American poetry.

“A dance of self-discovery, subverting our assumptions of gender and the body. . . . Both innovative and sensual, Rocket Fantastic is a vital book for our time.”
—Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronical

“I did not want this book to end. It is the most compelling thing I have read this year, without contest, and so very timely.”
—Sarah Warren, World Literature Today

“A vertiginous, wondering, painful, uncannily and deeply sexy book.”
—Maureen N. McLane

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of  The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing. 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 / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-492-8 / 92 pages / Poetry