Description
This title is no longer available for purchase through Black Lawrence Press, but it is available from most online book retailers. Better yet, your local bookstore should be able to order a copy for you.
Wholesale customers, please purchase this title through Ingram.
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Jessica Piazza’s This is not a sky begins with the seed of ekphrastic literature, then yawns, then stretches, then bursts beyond those bounds. Each of these 18 poems borrows a title from the greats-from Raphael and Turner to Warhol and Twombley-and through imagined narratives, takes the reader both inside and outside the paintings. In Piazza’s capable hands, the original art works serve as launch pads, and the poems are glorious departures. Through the guided commentary of an italicized speaker (sometimes commentator, sometimes companion, sometimes voyeur), we are taken to a long hallway wherein the reader wanders from room to room, peeking inside. Behind one door, “The ladies wore boas and nothing else; the beautiful men repeated themselves$$ and behind another, “You float, no floors, no doors in the office walls, hidden heavy hook of neck, crook of knee.” This is not a sky is a multi-faceted sensory experience; Piazza employs QR codes in tandem with each poem to allow the reader access to the original work of art alongside its poetic departure. Through her finely tuned ear for carefully considered formal metrical structures and rhyme, Piazza merges music, painting, and poetry to breathe new, strange, and modern life into the grand themes that have long given art its universality: death, love, religion, and truth.
CAFÉ TERRACE AT NIGHT
after Van Gogh
The ladies and gentleman, dapper. Astral lanterns glare gaily: the formerly ominous sky, candelabrad and gilded and precious.
(It’s Venice. Or Paris.
They’re tipsy. They’re gorgeous.)
Verandas are paintings for passersby, glaze-eyed, unstumbling, unfazed by the cobblestoned goings. The patrons, bedazzled on red woven rugs, drink café au lait, limoncello, and wine.
(And her? No really…she’s fine.)
Though the awning’s aslant, and the golden patina makes faceless and foregone, a shape of a shadow. A man in a doorway. A man she might know.
(Please go. Please go.)
And the curve of his coat summons thoughts of a lamp glinting harshly off mirrors she’d dampened with gauze. That lowing, that losing. That lowering light.
(One terrible night gives all other nights pause.)
But the stars. The stars. The promenade hours. The weather and color. The memories severed by laughter, its washing, its waves. No one gone, no one grave.
No graves.
