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.
