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The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart

Winner of the 2006 Connecticut Book Award

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.

Praise for the Book:
"Calvocoressi brings keen and sympathetic attention to the local disasters the larger world has often overlooked."—Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review

"An excoriation of present-day America by a new and lethal commentator."—Times Literary Supplment

"Remarkable . . . teas[es] meaning out of a past. . .that still dogs us."—Sarah Goodyear, Time Out New York

"A potent new talent enters the writing scene with this tour de force debut."—Booklist

"A powerful debut."—Library Journal

About the Author:
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review. She lives in Los Angeles, and teaches in the low-residency M.F.A. program in creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

Original Trade Paperback / $13.95 (Can. $19.50) / ISBN 978-089255-315-0 / 80 pages / Poetry