Calamity Joe

by Brendan Constantine

Overview

Reality has begun to show its age, have you noticed? Joe has.

Calamity Joe is the pen name of the mysterious narrator in a new kind of poetry collection. Spending his days in a lab, talking to mice & microbes, he will soon be the last living member of his family. More and more life seems to hint at its syntax and Joe feels that he can just make out the page he inhabits. Drastic measures are called for, but for what?

Poet Brendan Constantine hasn't crafted another 'novel in verse,' but a secret life revealed by poetry. Open it anywhere and be rewarded with poems that stand alone; read it from the beginning and discover the deeper context that ties every image together. As with his previous collections, Constantine employs countless approaches to poetry and no single style dominates. Looking through Joe's eyes we understand that life has no single story, that love is not a single feeling, and that consciousness may be an act of sheer will.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597091763
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	03/01/2012
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Brendan Constantine is a poet based in Hollywood. His work has appeared in numerous journals, most notably FIELD, Ploughshares, RATTLE, Ninth Letter, The Los Angeles Review, PANK, Redivider, RUNES, and the LA Times-bestseller The Underground Guide To Los Angeles. His first book, Letters to Guns, was released in 2009 by Red Hen Press.
 
Constantine holds an MFA degree from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is currently poet-in-residence at both Loyola Marymount University Extension and the Windward School in West Los Angeles. In addition, he conducts workshop classes at foster care centers, hospitals, and with the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project.

Editorial Reviews

Calamity Joe—much like ‘The Shield of Achilles’—is a convex mirror where the world is part Eden, part slum. Brendan Constantine is a dependable guide through the calamities of a “bottle-glutted” world: to the Injured and the poetry that survives and thrives there. The poems are landscapes and inscapes woven from the wilderness of childhood, and the aftermath of calamities and crimes. No howling. Urgency and shame temper the music to a compelling and sustaining song of our damaged world. Constantine’s marvelous new second book is both Mirror, and the World and Music reflected there. Constantine’s ‘Joe’ takes up where Berryman’s ‘Henry’ left off.”
—Scott Hightower

“‘A story is a house told by rooms,’ says Brendan Constantine in his new collection, Calamity Joe, ‘while a poem [is] one window flooded with light.’ One of this book’s great pleasures is that Constantine—and so the reader—manages to have it both ways, to give us both the poems, full of Constantine’s usual wit and energy, and also the story, which suggests itself and unfolds in the spaces between poems and in their conversations, both with each other and with us. Calamity Joe is a splendid house, and its windows are blazing, whether you are standing inside or out.”
—Katharine Coles, author of Fault and A History of the Garden

“In Calamity Joe’s world, language works as an electric lens through which our world shines back as still ours, but renewed and refreshed. Flamingoes live in a house with plastic people on the lawn. The splendors here remind us that we can realize and appreciate so much more than what we can merely recognize. With a remarkable attention to craft—internal rhymes, repetitions, unexpected rhythmic swervings—Constantine’s poems issue forth from a voice charged by all it’s seen along the way. I found these poems compelling in every good way.”
—Nance Van Winckel

From the Publisher