Description
The book "The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart: Poems" by Gabrielle Calvocoressi is a collection of poems that explore the themes of longing, tragedy, and the struggles of small-town America. Through her use of imagination and empathy, Calvocoressi gives voice to the hopes and heartbreaks of the people in these communities. The poems are written in a vernacular style and touch on topics such as ambition, failure, and corruption. Overall, the book portrays a troubled landscape and tells a story of those who have been left behind.
Whether in the title poem, spoken by those who lived longingly and vicariously through the famous missing aviator, or in "Circus Fire, 1944," which intimately recounts a haunting New England tragedy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi uses her prodigious gifts of imagination and empathy to give voice to the hope and heartbreak of small-town America. In painstaking, vernacular verse, she conveys the ambitions and failings of a distraught populace-in the edgy jazz portrait, "Suite Billy Strayhorn," for example, or the enthralling, interwoven sequence, "At the Adult Drive-In," which conveys, at once, a personal and communal corruption. Penetrating and compassionate,
The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart portrays, with a storyteller's arc, the troubled landscape of the left-behind.