The New Economy - by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A collection of poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

The New Economy memorializes the world's pleasures and perils told through the point of view of an aging, ungendered body.

A devotional to the ungendered vessel as it ages, dreams, and survives. A practice of radical collaboration, failure, and renewal. A world of "Miss You" poems opening a portal to all those we've lost and would love to visit for a while. In Gabrielle Calvocoressi's latest collection, The New Economy, poems are haunted by the ghosts of loved ones and childhood memories, by changing landscapes and bodies. Calvocoressi's own figure is examined--investigating the desire to protect the body one is born with and the longing to have been born in another. Cisterns sing with the musicality of a poet who understands both the power of sound and silence--those quiet spaces inviting us to consider the words we cannot hear. "The days I don't kill myself are extraordinary" one poems says. "Why don't we have a name for it?" Lyrical and unafraid, The New Economy invites us to name our fears and sorrows, to write to who or what has left us, to create practices that can hold both the darkness and light of this (in)finite life.

Review Quotes

Praise for The New Economy

"Survival and renewal are at the heart of Calvocoressi's exploration of childhood memories, the ungendered body's aging, and the commitment to living through fear and pain."--Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly Top Ten Fall Preview 2025

Praise for Gabrielle Calvocoressi

"Calvocoressi resists the limitations of language―especially where gender is concerned―to more fully capture the experience of a self 'unlimited in its possibilities.' . . . These poems balance wildness and control in a fearless treatment of eros, identity, trauma, and all that resists easy categorization. The voice encompasses the colloquial as well as the high lyrical. . . . When particular forms aren't up to the task of rendering something with tender and unflinching attentiveness, Calvocoressi reaches outside of poetry altogether: 'Oh. It. Was. Beautiful. No metaphor will do.'"--Publishers Weekly

"Gabrielle Calvocoressi is one of those writers I love so much that I look at bookstores' shelves hoping she's written a new book. Now she has, and the pleasure of these new poems about gender, God, loss, joy, politics, love and the struggle for meaning in language and in this difficult moment in the United States are all here for us- and we're richer for it. Go find what's lush, what's troublesome, what's an invitation to your own path in this magnificent new collection."--Rebecca Solnit

"She is a daring act as a poet/athlete . . . but she can also travel the backwoods, pointing out herons, ivy vines and creek water with a kind of divining rod rightness. . . . Her wild lyrics shudder and shine, jubilant and threatening, exuberant."--Carol Muske-Dukes, The Huffington Post

"I did not want this book to end. It is wide open, vulnerable, and seductive--the most compelling thing I have read this year, without contest, and so very timely."--Sarah Warren, World Literature Today

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

About the Author

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 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. Calvocoressi is the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022-2023.