Poetry. Predicated on the structure of a Book of Days, G-POINT ALMANAC is a long-poem sequence that fixes poems to specific days of the year and times of day. The third book of the g-point almanac tetralogy, PASSYUNK LOST follows Kevin Varrone through a wintry season in Philadelphia as he undergoes an existential search for spirituality in the declining post-industrial city. However, instead of writing a poem on each day of a year, the sequence references a variety of sources to capture Varrone's cumulative emotional and physical experiences to create a poem for each day of a year. The result is a flaneur's forlorn travelogue of a nostalgic world where the height of a building did not eclipse the brim of a man's hat.
Author City: PHILADELPHIA, PA USA
Kevin Varrone is the author of G-POINT ALMANAC: PASSYUNK LOST (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), G-POINT ALMANAC: ID EST (9.22-12.21) (Instance Press, 2007), and g-point Almanac (7.21-9.21) (Ixnay Press, 2000). His poems have also appeared in numerous print journals and online, including 6x6, Big Bridge, Cross Connect, the ixnay reader, volume 2, American Poetry Review: The Philly Edition, and Duration Press's ebook series. With poet Pattie McCarthy, he edited and co-founded Beautiful Swimmer Press. He currently lives in Philadelphia, where he teaches literature and writing at Temple University.
Reviews and Other Links
Leah Souffrant @ Jacket2
"Stop! Look! And by God, Listen! as with gorgeous verve, gobsmacking style and deep seriousness Kevin Varrone lets keeningly loose herein no fewer than 'a billion nanotreasons of air.' G-POINT ALMANAC—this strange, marvelous, sometimes shouting, sometimes whispering thing —is just the complex reading of the early century we've been waiting for."
—Laird Hunt
"'[P]assyunk avenue was a footpath.' This latest installment in Kevin Varrone's G-POINT ALMANAC offers ambulatory travel rich with epistemic philosophy & a depth of intelligence one couldn't anticipate: 'something imperfect may carry / something perfect.' I am jealous I didn't discover the forms in 'a fornight for st. distaff,' but receiving them second-hand is a most fortunate consolation. At the core of the pleasure of passyunk lost is Varrone's remarkable ear. Where darkness surrounds us, so might music."
—Carol Mirakove
"At times ironic and sincere, G-POINT ALMANAC: PASSYUNK LOST is a written history of observing nature that simultaneously manages a reading of the tradition of such a practice. The poems move through an Objectivist prosody with nods to Olson, Stein, Williams, Whitman, Thoreau—a grand American Romanticism embraced and reconfigured in the wake of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school."
—Martin Corless-Smith
"In PASSYUNK LOST, Kevin Varrone presents Philadelphia in a pearlescent winter light that shimmers through the leafless branches of the trees. As if pausing in the cold on an empty street, one hears in the flutter and cry of the birds an incipient language giving rise to a new kind of urban ecology, one whose measure is that of the mind as it hears itself singing."
—Michael Kelleher