Avail - by Erin O'Luanaigh (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Avail features a long prose-poem which titles the book and winds through sections of lineated, often formal poems. The prose-poem comprises a series of lyric meditations on the image of the veil--from religious and cultural veils, to veils imbedded in idiom and metaphor, to veiled women in art and classic films, to veils drawn and parted by illness and death--which slowly divulge the harrowing details of the poet's blood disorder.

Throughout, allusions to classic film, literature, and art serve as the "veils" with which the poet attempts to obscure the self-estrangement and vulnerability her illness has induced--insecurities which follow her long after her recovery. In a poem about a break-up set during her career as a jazz singer and against the backdrop of a 1930s screwball comedy, she longs "to shake life by the martini (but stay self- / possessed), to star in the movie of myself / instead of playing second lead". During a visit to Naples, Mt. Vesuvius becomes "a Crawford eyebrow / arched over the bay." And in California, after a trip to the Getty Villa, she recalls Sontag's "missive on allusion, that no part / of any work is new, that all is reproduction." By the end of the collection, O'Luanaigh has fashioned from the sum of these various allusions her own poetic identity, unveiled in the poems themselves.

About the Author

Erin O'Luanaigh worked as a jazz singer before receiving her MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. Her poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Bad Lilies, AGNI, The Southern Review, Subtropics, 32 Poems, Nimrod, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Connecticut, she currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. Avail is her first book.

Ange Mlinko is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Foxglovewise (FSG).