[a] strange, marvelous, sometimes shouting, sometimes whispering thing
Laird Hunt
g-point almanac: passyunk lost
Kevin Varrone
February 2010
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. Predicated on the structure of a Book of Days, passyunk lost is a long-poem sequence that fixes poems to specific days of the year and times of day. 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.
About the Author
Kevin Varrone is the author of g-point almanac: id est (9/22-12/21) (Instance Press, 2007), and g-point Almanac (7/21-9/21) (Ixnay Press). His poems have also appeared in numerous print journals and online, including 6×6, 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.
Praise
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
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
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 fortnight 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
In Kevin's Varrone's deeply serious g-point almanac: passyunk lost text is never more than an extension of texture. Varrone's deep skepticism of language is counter-braced by an aggregate interface with the living world 'of wissahickon mica/ schist 'til/ heft is on us.' Here, the 'heft' indeed 'is on us', life-force and all. In Varrone's graceful hands texture is not merely texture, but its full weight in text.
Thomas Devaney
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 the News
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-933254-52-4
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 104 pp, 6.5 x 8 in
Publication Date: February 01 2010
Distribution: SPD