Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Sarasota VII soon to be released!



Cervena Barva Press announces the release of Lo Galluccio's Sarasota VII, a prose-poem of 65 pages

that was inspired by the works of Paul Auster, Margurite Duras and Elizabeth Smart. In two parts, this

experimental work of passionate memoir explores how death and place and desire intersect in a studio in

Florida overlooking the Atlantic ocean. Part 1 explores one lover's loss of his sister Teres, from "evil winning

in the motives of a handful of boys." The voracious pull of black holes and the pure ice water of Saturn intermittantly

tug at the book, as a deconstructed symphony. In the 2nd part, Galluccio writes of her own father's fade out and

her resolve to become whole.


ADVANCE PRAISE:


So this is what Anne Boleyn whispered to the men who took her head—both her husband and her executioner—so this is what the henchman replied; for nowhere has sinner and saint been so exquisitely linked than in Lo Galluccio's Sarasota VII. As the curtain parts, it is not polar opposites that are revealed but a single conjoined child. Traversing Sarasota VII (it has less in common with reading, more so the navigation to heaven or the surrender into hell) is like giving definition to the word 'passion.' This is how to say profoundly simple words with often incomprehensible meanings: Love. Desire. Hate. Birth. Destruction. And who hasn't attempted this— to grasp the single rose in the pit of thorns. And who hasn't, on occasion, failed and been banished? But Lo's beautiful, prophetic prose lulls us, even as we burn, and she tells us to "Fossilize the monster" and "Tend our rings like vain kings." She is right. We must. For something so terrifyingly beautiful should, forever, be.

Coleen T. Houlihan, novelist and poet, "the Human Heart."


Saturn in astrology is often called the planet of discipline, limitations, karma, and boundaries. Lo Galluccio explores these aspects of the human condition in Sarasota VII,, noting: "with every death we're given an opportunity to expand or to contract." Her finely drawn study contains great depth, revealing both simple and complex souls whose crashing hearts echo the breaking waves of the Atlantic; swelling and shrinking, drying and drowning, dying while they still go on living. Like Saturn, these people have had something crash through them, only to create a ring of debris they carry to balance their skewed axis. As in the heavens, there is much beauty and much destruction, where even light cannot escape black holes, and "nothing's pure and nothing's stable." Galluccio takes the reader on a journey from a hotel room in Florida into the expansive cosmos of the soul, revealing a woman caught up between passion and intellect, raging to be free while seeking to merge; loving, losing, dominating and submitting in her evolution to reconnect and be whole.

Karen Bowles, Luciole Press

The first public reading of "Sarasota VII" will take place September 29th at Stone Soup at the Out of the Blue Gallery on Prospect St. in Cambridge. Then on October 19th, Lo will perform with electric guitarist Ivan Korn, adding an improvised score to selections from the work and songs at the Witch City Cafe in Salem, MA.

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Sarah Hannah 1967-2001

STRANGE ANGELS

STRANGE ANGELS

Laurie Anderson The Dream Before (for Walter Benjamin) lyrics


"Hansel and Gretel are alive and well And they're living in Berlin She is a cocktail waitress He had a part in a Fassbinder film And they sit around at night now drinking schnapps and gin And she says: Hansel, you're really bringing me down And he says: Gretel, yu can really be a bitch He says: I've wated my life on our stupid legend When my one and only love was the wicked witch. She said: What is history? And he said: History is an angel being blown backwards into the future He said: History is a pile of debris And the angel wants to go back and fix things To repair the things that have been broken But there is a storm blowing from Paradise And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future And this storm, this storm is called Progress."

Laurie Anderson The Dream Before (for Walter Benjamin) lyrics




Tony on Sherman St.

Mary Louise Parker

Mary Louise Parker
Good Witch of "Weeds" TV

Goliath's Head

Goliath's Head
Caravaggio

MEMORIAL DAY by Lo Galluccio

I might have stood with my Mother

on Sparks Street cheering the veterans of America’s

just and unjust wars

march past,

weeping for my Dad who died

jaundiced in the infirmary of society

not on the opera bloodied battlefield.

Instead into the cold confines of

film spectacle to see young Scandinavians

wrestle with writing and go mad,

jumping into the cold cobalt sea

off Oslo piers--

Two days ago Caravaggio’s dead Madonna

in crimson cloak crossed my mind as a Reiki healer

pulled my ear lobes. The church rejected

her because she was so heavy and lifeless,

daring to lie there dead,

not asleep for ascension’s sake--

That day I left behind my watch and black wrist band.

Strange, he’d made me undress--

the badboy of the Renaissance who loved his sword

and put his head into Goliath’s -- eyes bulging

with crazed fury, held by David’s victorious angelic fist.

To be today, not to be seen, to swear allegiance

to something else.