Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 78
- Language: English
- Published: October, 2014
- ISBN: 978-1-939929-16-7
Praise
This is a luminous debut collection by Ann Cefola. In her own unique voice, her narratives possess relaxed rhythms, fresh and, at times, startling imagery that are infused with grace and intelligence. The entire collection is a journey grounded with emotional precision as found in the poems “Blue Moon,” “Still Life,” and “Dance in the City.” It is also a journey through the day-to-day locales that we all recognize, but tend to overlook. In the hands of this gifted poet, these locales often transform into the sensual and exotic. Read Face Painting In The Dark closely and you will revisit the classical themes of love, loss then ultimately redemption and hope. Here are poems where you will find, “the moon bursting forth” and in the end what it truly means to be human. —Kevin Pilkington
The powerful images in Ann Cefola’s Face Painting In The Dark force us to abandon our anchors in any particular place or time. In language that is at once magical, lucid and specific, the narrator addresses her identity as defined by social conventions, by literature, and by her (and our) personal experience. Cefola’s images celebrate the miracle of life as it is renewed every day. —Nahid Rachlin
Excerpt
Forceps
Half century later, what clamps my skull?
Fingertips trace small canals of resistance.
Neck stretches. Leaving my watery home,
hooked like a fish, fast sonar beat, spasm of air.
Soul braces, Here we go. No cheers:
Cold city street. People rushing to trains.
What will happen to me? — I don’t know, sweet pea,
my Confederate grandmother might say.
Her daughter, eighty-seven, dreams me newborn
in her lap. When I awoke, she says, I felt happy
and warm. I rub my temples. How to see
in the explosive light?
Author
Ann Cefola is the author of St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped (Kattywompus Press, 2011) and Sugaring (Dancing Girl Press, 2007), and translator of Hélène Sanguinetti’s Hence this cradle (Seismicity Editions, 2007). She is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award, judged by John Ashbery; a Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency Award at the Santa Fe Art Institute; and an MFA in Poetry Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.
Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Feminist Studies, Natural Bridge, and Sugar Mule, and is widely anthologized, most recently in the award-winning A Slant of Light: Women Poets of the Hudson Valley (Codhill Press, 2013). Her translations of contemporary French poet Hélène Sanguinetti have also been published in journals such as Eleven Eleven, Exchanges and Inventory.
Ann works as a writer in the New York suburbs, where she lives with her husband, Michael, and their shelter-rescued dog, Daisy. For more about Ann, see www.anncefola.com and her poetry and arts blog, www.annogram.blogspot.com.
