Anna Rosen Guercio has assembled love poems about language in motion through public spaces made suddenly intimate. But these poems propose a love between couples that are not always only people, but also words themselves in paired orbits of erotic, contestatory, reinforcing attractions and collisions: travel and float; sails and shoulders; calligram and court collapse; shadow play commons and elliptical opening out; emergence and persistence; the seen and the traced; the rue and the court -- you and the poems that grace you with a tenderness and honesty you don't deserve. --Craig Dworkin
Anna Rosen Guercio is a translator and poet living in Los Angeles. Her work has recently appeared in Pool, Anomalous Press, The Kenyon Review Online, Painted Bride Quarterly, The St. Petersburg Review, Prime Number, Eleven Eleven, Faultline, Entasis, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is the translator of José Eugenio Sánchez's Suite Prelude a/H1N1 (Toad Press) and a forthcoming novel. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and is finishing a PhD from the University of California, Irvine.
DUET FOR PIANO AND POEM
A certain opacity to her eyes as they say, “small forms.”
And I know something about these hands on keys as if love’s neck, makes mine ache, and about this music sutured like the dreams we tell ourselves before falling, sleep. Whose idea of night and what paltry resistance are these, my quiet, my small forms.
Hers a song to accompany image, a dialogue as repertoire. And mine, small sounding place for: “There is nothing natural can quiet its feet in fall.”
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