Gerry Lafemina
Gerry LaFemina is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Graffiti Heart (winner of the Anthony Piccione Prize in Poetry), The Window Facing Winter and The Parakeets of Brooklyn (winner of the Bordighera Prize); two collections of prose poems; and Wish List, a collection of short stories. A former punk musician and a former member of the Associated Writing Programs Board of Directors, he directs the Frostburg Center for Creative Writing at Frostburg State University, where he also teaches. He divides his time between Maryland and New York.
How rare it is for any poet to write with equal parts gravitas and scherzo and Gerry LaFemina’s The Story of Ash is rich in both. The title poem tells us “It was the Chinese who first made ink from ash” and in the ink of these poems LaFemina gathers up the ashes of our crazy world: what’s left after conflagration, the cigarette burning in an ashtray, the gray smudge on the faces of coal miners, and “the thumbprint of the divine” on the first day of Lent. Richly descriptive, both haunted and haunting, The Story of Ash is a brilliant tragi-comedy in which memory is “the last shelter any of us have.” — Maggie Anderson
THE STORY OF ASH BY GERRY LAFEMINA $20.00
VANISHING HORIZON
BY GERRY LAFEMINA
$17.00 (email us for availability)
The Vanishing Horizon is full of gritty and graceful intelligence. Consistently and sumptuously detailed, these poems amount to a kind of landscape of the soul, that aspect of self that runs the gauntlet -- weathers, wearies, kneels -- then grins and keeps on. It’s hard to make a way in this world, to see clearly without coming to deep despair. This book is good light. -- Tim Seibles, author of Buffalo Head Solos