Spoke & Dark

(Paperback)

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There is no word for the place between the dying hand and the living hand that holds it, but there is a space between those hands. Spoke & Dark dwells there, in the tensions that inhere between one thing & another: lost & found, future & past, life & afterlife. Using typographical symbols (#, /, and especially &) to delineate these phantom s

Reviews

"Here is a poetry surefooted and supple, 'wild and delicate/both, how strange.' A good solid strangeness at the core; a command of pivotal shifts in tonality, guiding the pacing of these poems; an intuitive, understatedly dramatic way of bringing a poem to a close, one that does not cinch or bind ('the best part is the end, that incidental/ silence that shows the rest for what it was.')--all contribute to a collection that summons up the deep pleasures and rewards of the poetry of Basil Bunting and Lorine Niedecker. A remarkable and startling collection."--Alice Quinn

"Proposal: the humblest part of speech as a principle of cognition. As in the and, the one thing and another. As in the mortal paradox: here and gone. As in the newborn's foundational gaze, when 'face seeks / face to fix upon.' Carolyn Guinzio is far too savvy a writer to make her case with circumstantial detail, the plausible gestures of auto- or allo-biography. She is after recognition of a far more essential, far more demanding sort. And, thrillingly, this is exactly what she achieves, in a book as beautifully crafted and stirringly intelligent as any I have read in a very, very long time. These are brilliant, heartening, necessary poems."
--Linda Gregerson

Author Bio

Carolyn Guinzio was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. She earned a BA at Columbia College, Chicago, and an MFA at Bard College in New York. Her first book, West Pullman, won the 2004 Bordighera Poetry Prize and appeared in an English/Italian edition. Her second book is Quarry (Parlor Press, 2008). In 2011, she cofounded the online project Yew: A Journal of Innovative Writing & Images By Women. She lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with her husband, poet Davis McCombs, and their two children.