Gabrielle Calvocoressi's Rocket Fantastic
4th Annual Cox Family Process Speaker Series
The Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) at CU Boulder hosts our 4th annual Cox Family Process Speaker Series on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, and features award-winning poet, artist, and Associate Professor of creative writing Gabrielle Calvocoressi. The Cox Family Process Speaker Series annual programming seeks to bring renowned artists and scholars to CU Boulder each spring to speak about work that made them well-known in their fields of study and research.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic (winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry). This event focuses on Calvocoressi's Rocket Fantastic, which has been described as a "spellbinding reinvention and exploration of self, gender, and family." In Rocket Fantastic, Calvocoressi innovatively uses the musical segno symbol in replacement of traditional pronouns for one of the main characters, allowing readers to engage with the poem’s content while leaving sex and gender as an open question. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.
The first 30 people to register (and attend the event) will receive a free copy of the book Rocket Fantastic. We will have refreshments and dessert available for all attendees.
Please note that this event is free and open to the public, but registration is recommended. Register here if you wish to attend the event: https://web.cvent.com/event/b4d62620-bd2b-427a-a938-d489874c4a68/summary
About the Speaker
Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry.
Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer's Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi's poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures.
Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn't Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi was the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022 - 2023. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.
About the Book
Rocket Fantastic: Poems
"A spellbinding reinvention and exploration of self, gender, and family."
Like nothing before it, Rocket Fantastic transfigures the landscape and language of gender and the body. Its poems are populated by figures both familial and fabular: a prodigal brother and a relentless father; the Hermit, Dowager, and Major General; and, perhaps most strikingly, the Bandleader, embodiment of sexual, capitalistic, and political dominance. Mythic and musical, erogenous yet wide-eyed, this is a dazzling book by a space-age troubadour of American poetry.
“A dance of self-discovery, subverting our assumptions of gender and the body. . . . Both innovative and sensual, Rocket Fantastic is a vital book for our time.”
—Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronical
“I did not want this book to end. It is the most compelling thing I have read this year, without contest, and so very timely.”
—Sarah Warren, World Literature Today
“A vertiginous, wondering, painful, uncannily and deeply sexy book.”
—Maureen N. McLane
Quote from Author Interview with Green Linden Press:
"The thing that’s interesting to me about the Bandleader poems and that [dal segno] symbol has to do with power and how we relate to power in ourselves and others. I think for me in my own body that’s had a lot to do with what I think of as my male body, which is how I identified until I was about seven (and still do in many ways), and how I relate to my feminine body. There’s a quote at the end of the book, “Depending on the day, the Bandleader is this or that”—and I don’t mean that in a trite way; I really mean that. So the Bandleader and the symbol and the intake of breath are me trying to allow the illegibility of my understanding and my need for understanding of my body and my physical space in the world to become apparent—to myself first and then to others. I don’t know if that makes sense."
- Gabrielle Calvocoressi on Rocket Fantastic — October 15, 2017
Review of Rocket Fantastic, Inside Higher Ed:
One of the most important qualities of being a writer is a kind of bravery. Rocket Fantastic has this above all else, and in a way that overflows, giving power to the limited and the denied; not only in terms of gender, but those of ideas. The poems resist those invisible structures upon which the political economy insists. To that end, the poems often have violence at their edges, as if an atavistic presence is there working in the background. Poems often play with tone to convey their meanings; others evoke a mood and nothing more; yet when have you read a poem that uses feelings almost as textures, coloring the background, and through which the speaker(s) peer through, are held down by, or escape from? Using emotion in a dimensional way is something this book advances and it’s something from which we could all learn a great deal.
- Sean Singer, Reviewer - November 14, 2017