Redemption

by Lee Passarella

The old saw tells us that we shouldn't argue politics or religion. In the poetry collection REDEMPTION, Lee Passarella avoids these two minefields as best he can, highlighting instead the redemptive moments that make modern life both a journey AND a destination. The going is often rough, as the poetry suggests through the experiences of a number of personas both fictional and real (Beethoven, Dante, Pilate). But REDEMPTION also celebrates those instances of revelation that help us make sense of the seemingly senseless and peace with the world, no matter how briefly.

94 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 2014

About the author

Lee Passarella acts as senior literary editor for Atlanta Review magazine and served as editor-in-chief of Coreopsis Books, a poetry-book publisher. He also writes classical music reviews for Audiophile Audition.

Lee’s poetry has appeared in Chelsea, Cream City Review, Louisville Review, The Formalist, Antietam Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Literary Review, Edge City Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Snake Nation Review, Umbrella, Slant, Cortland Review, and many other periodicals and online journals.

Swallowed up in Victory, Lee Passarella’s long narrative poem based on the American Civil War, was published by White Mane Books in 2002. It has been praised by poet Andrew Hudgins as a work that is “compelling and engrossing as a novel.” Lee has published two poetry collections: The Geometry of Loneliness (David Robert Books, 2006) and Redemption (FutureCycle Press, 2014). His poetry chapbook, Sight-Reading Schumann, was published by Pudding House Publications in 2007.

Lee’s first young-adult novel, Storm in the Valley, was released in February by Ravenswood Publishing. Like Swallowed Up in Victory, the novel is set in Civil War Virginia. Currently, Lee is hard at work on a sequel.

Reviews

[FutureCycle Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:


AUGURY

As I drive to work, two vultures
sit on the shoulder of the road
picking through trash, solemn and unruffled
as bag ladies, the gray drapery of their feathers
tented over their humped asses
like outsized raincoats.

I want them to be dreadful:
slag-gray wings spreading to the very corners
of the frame my car window makes
out of this scene on the icy verges
of an old man’s bleared Thanksgiving—
invalid wife sicker still today,
sinuses rotten with infection;
my hangover lifting its gray scrim
above the mediocrity of a job suffered
only by degrees: Oil spill. Melanoma.
Soul’s eclipse.

But there they sit, wings folded back
into two brief hunches
at the shoulder. No grim majesty
anywhere to be seen. Bodies sketchy,
shapeless—huge barnyard hens
with heads the gravelly white

of decayed snow melting
down into rumpled wattles.
Omens not of death
but worse. Of life.


TOO MUCH

Villanelle for William

“The world is too much with us,” someone said.
(Not sure who, but it doesn’t matter now;
whoever the guy was is surely dead).

Sometimes I feel that way: I lie in bed
and think I’d rather kill my eats with bow
and arrow than just get and spend, as said

that someone—not sure who—who thought we’re led
to give our hearts away and don’t allow
ourselves the time (before we’re surely dead)

to stop and watch the moon rise, golden red,
above “This Sea that bares her bosom....” How
a sea can have a bosom, like he said,

is to personify the thing instead
of call a spade a spade, for all time stow
the used-up lingo of the surely dead.

Same thing with “Triton’s horn”: I’m really fed
up with allusions—deck that sacred cow!
The world was too much with him, like he said,
that guy who’s, evidently, long since dead.