"If Frank O'Hara had lived to chronicle the post 9/11 decade, he might have written these wonderfully funny, sad, heartbreaking, jaunty, and always delightfully accurate poems by Peter Covino.”
Marjorie Perloff
“Covino's clarity of vision allows for narrative elements that tell the story of sexual awakening and maturation as a backdrop to deeper meditations on morality, mortality, and the multi-cultural polyglot of America as both dream and reality. These are poems of lasting importance."
D.A. Powell
"Images of real and symbolic violence ricochet and reflect off each other in this elegant and disturbing collection. The poems chronicle, among other things, a history of childhood abuse and its after effects, but in a larger sense, they also explore through the lens of myth, art, religion, and popular culture, the underlying and often unacknowledged brutality beneath even mundane events."
from the judges' citation: PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award
“I do not know who wrote this manuscript. Yet these poems have managed to remain a memorable anonymous encounter, the contest notwithstanding. I think Frank O’Hara would have liked the ease of the voice and the keen sense of place these poems create, whether at a Hallmark Store or at a Writers’ Conference where the speaker is trying to pass for straight. The erotic impulse seems quite indifferent to the categories that we assign each other and our selves (gay/straight, madonna/whore). Where but in poems could we find our poet cruising at the Triple Treat Theatre one minute and thumbing through a Sports Illustrated desktop calendar the next? And it’s even harder to recall when the last time was that a gay poet made us swoon over a woman or two before waltzing off into the shadows, leaving us to wonder just who it is we thought we were.”
Timothy Liu
Part of Dalle acque del parto, lei mi parla
on Instagram – atelierpoesia
© 2023 All Rights Reserved.