He contends with the limits of clarity using some quite brilliant anagrams and homonyms, as in “parents in the train window winnowed to transparence.” Sometimes Giannelli seems to pull stunning phrases whole from the ether, describing the tides as “the ocean tearing blue page after/ blue page from its journal.” He also explores grief through a document written by a deceased grandfather, its perplexities perhaps easier to contend with than those of life itself. Metaphors are applied and swapped out, as in “Hydrangea,” where the flower is a snow cone, a “Bearded lady,// balloon man, chameleon,” “honeycomb/ and bouquet,” “viscous muscle,” and more.
In “Star Gazers,” “we” look out at the stars, but they are looking right back at us. Adam Giannelli is the author of Tremulous Hinge (University of Iowa Press, 2017), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize.He is also the translator of a selection of prose poems by Marosa di Giorgio, Diadem (BOA Editions, 2012), which was shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and the editor of High Lonesome (Oberlin College Press, 2006), a collection of critical essays on. This striving for fluency could have been born from the childhood speech impediment the poet reflects on poignantly in the opening poem: “since I can’t say everlasting/ I say every/ lost thing.” At the same time, Giannelli is preoccupied with double meanings. Giannelli’s debut is a quiet affair, but its simplicity masks layers and a longing for precision exhibited through minute adjustments, tweaked phrases, and shifting imagery. From its initial turbulence to its final surprising solace, this debut collection mesmerizes.
He is able to display the conflict of time and language in the minutia of everyday life. Ultimately, among lofting waves, collapsing hands, and darkening skies, words themselves-a stutterer's maneuvers through speech, a deceased grandfather’s use of punctuation-become forms of consolation. Adam Giannelli seizes the fine line between light and dark while exposing the movement through language in his book Tremulous Hinge.
#Tremulous hinge series
Through a series of self-portraits, elegies, and Eros-tinged meditations, this hovering never subsides but offers, among the fragments, momentary constellations: “moths all swarming the / same light bulb.”įrom the difficulties of stuttering to teetering attempts at love, from struggling to order a hamburger to tracing the deckled edge of a hydrangea, these poems tumble and hum, revealing a hinge between word and world. In these visually porous poems, boundaries waver and reconfigure along the rumbling shoreline of Rockaway or during the intermediary hours that an insomniac undergoes between darkness and dawn.
#Tremulous hinge windows
Rain intermits, bus windows steam up, loved ones suffer from dementia-in the constantly shifting, metaphoric world of Tremulous Hinge, figures struggle to remain standing and speaking against forces of gravity, time, and language.
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