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Flowersonnets
Poems for love and death. Visual poetry. Experimental. Cover designed by Dylan Garrett Smith
Flowersonnets navigates the ephemerality of love and the permanence of death through language so gorgeous, it will take your breath away: “flounders about / the hyacinth créme / de menthe she’s / dreaming this / a sleep / she’s ceased / breathing.” While these poems often channel the linguistically perfumed voices of past poets like Baudelaire, Colavita reinvents the sonnet through his inclusion of careful shaping, breaks, and blankness, making each poem entirely his own. Decadent, elegiac, and devastating in their Ophelia-esque darkness — Angelo Colavita’s Flowersonnets is the collection of contemporary love poems you’ve been longing for, which is to say it isn’t quite like anything you’ve ever seen.
— Kailey Tedesco, author of She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publishing) and Lizzie, Speak (White Stag Publishing)
Flowersonnets navigates the ephemerality of love and the permanence of death through language so gorgeous, it will take your breath away: “flounders about / the hyacinth créme / de menthe she’s / dreaming this / a sleep / she’s ceased / breathing.” While these poems often channel the linguistically perfumed voices of past poets like Baudelaire, Colavita reinvents the sonnet through his inclusion of careful shaping, breaks, and blankness, making each poem entirely his own. Decadent, elegiac, and devastating in their Ophelia-esque darkness — Angelo Colavita’s Flowersonnets is the collection of contemporary love poems you’ve been longing for, which is to say it isn’t quite like anything you’ve ever seen.
— Kailey Tedesco, author of She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publishing) and Lizzie, Speak (White Stag Publishing)
32 pages, Chapbook
First published May 18, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 6, 2020
Keep an eye out for my review to be published in the March 2020 edition of the literary magazine Ovunque Siamo!
October 12, 2018
Very challenging, very interesting, very vivid. Experimental spacing helps create a funeral mood. I will be the first one to admit that it's hard to read a poem breaking and abstracting the space of the page. The collection presents the reader with language that grasps for the gothic and the grotesque. The Oscar Wilde quote at the beginning is apt--it's all of a piece.
Here are bits of language that gave my brain a nice blossom:
"the way the clock mocks
the way the dawn taunts"
"they bury the streets we're buried
beneath the streets with sewage
the rats down here feed"
"one more orphan
hovering above the flora"
I liked the collection and recommend having it in your hands to read. You'll get a visceral impact as well as a cerebral one. Although I have trouble reading experimental poetry I felt that the tradition it was invoking with Wilde gave me something to grab onto.
"I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.
She dragged it out again and assured me
that I had spoiled her life."
==The Picture of Dorian Gray
Here are bits of language that gave my brain a nice blossom:
"the way the clock mocks
the way the dawn taunts"
"they bury the streets we're buried
beneath the streets with sewage
the rats down here feed"
"one more orphan
hovering above the flora"
I liked the collection and recommend having it in your hands to read. You'll get a visceral impact as well as a cerebral one. Although I have trouble reading experimental poetry I felt that the tradition it was invoking with Wilde gave me something to grab onto.
"I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.
She dragged it out again and assured me
that I had spoiled her life."
==The Picture of Dorian Gray
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews