Revolutions
I asked a friend that works at Barnes & Nobel to suggest a few books by Pittsburgh authors, and she recommended a novel in B&N’s poetry section, Revolutions, by Justin Calderone. I have a passing interest in poetry, but I am trying to broaden my palate, so I purchased Revolutions.
What a great find!
Revolutions isn’t the dry, obtuse poetry we were forced to read in high school. It’s like listening to a concept album, minus the music. Think Jim Morrison, Jack Kerouac or Eddie Vedder, not Shakespeare, Keates and Marlowe. This is rock n’ roll poetry about a rough two years in Calderone’s life. And it’s all there; love (both won and lost), God, hurts, hang-up, desolation. The nakedness of the writing goes directly to Calderone’s heart, and I felt as though I was going through the situation with him as I read each poem.
Here’s one of my favorites:
I will love
The loss of life
And the smile at the end
This time out
I will love
The person I will myself to
Be
If I sit alone by night
And wonder where the world
Is
I will swallow myself
In the hunger of life
I saw you a million times
In every star
And streetlight
And how I fight
To open my eyes
And be blinded by you again
Because of the frankness and ease of the language, Revolutions reads like a novel. Calderone is clearly searching for something, the great “something” that everyone wants. It’s unnamable, and unreachable, yet Calderone brings all of us on the trip.
In researching this review, I found Justin Calderone’s blog at justincalderone.com. The blog says that his next novel LARP: The Battle for Verona, is scheduled for a Spring 2012 release.
