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Review by Kimberly Ann Southwick
Review by Natalie Marino
Playlist of five poems from chapbook:
Eliot said, “all time is eternally present,” and Andrea Panzeca proves it with an atomic bang or maybe a rocket blast into the heavens. In these delirious poems she marries a jazzy present with memory and dreams and comes up with a wild poetic cocktail that will make you word drunk and ready to take off to places unknown. A glorious debut!
—Barbara Hamby, Guggenheim fellow and author of On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems
Grounded in marginal coastal worlds, Andrea Panzeca’s wonderful debut collection is both bold and modest, intimate and unpredictable, free and full. Even its elegies—for loved people and moist land—brim with life. Surely yet invisibly crafted, these poems fall creatively down their pages, as their speaker does into the Gulf’s waves, their energy immense, original, and right.
—Randy Bates, author of Dolphin Island and Rings: On the Life and Family of Collis Phillips
Andrea Panzeca’s Rusted Bells and Daisy Baskets concerns territories in flux — the coasts of Louisiana and Florida and the liminal spaces of memory and dream. The book is an elegy for pre-Katrina New Orleans and the poet’s father who appears “Glock / in one hand, the remote in the other — changes / the station from White Oleander to white noise.“ While the debut’s dramatic situation invokes the Southern Gothic tradition, its readers encounter a distinctive way of seeing this world. Likewise, through recognizable poetic kinds — prayer, self-portrait, ekphrastic poem, among others — Panzeca “tell[s] it slant”; her birthday poem, “On Turning 30,” addresses a stolen library book, Isadore Duncan’s My Life. But it is the unsettling imagery, consummate sonics, the fierce conscience of Panzeca’s book that brings us the “news that stays news.”
—Carolyn Hembree, author of Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague and Skinny
The swerving mind in Andrea Panzeca’s poems might just be capacious enough to swallow the world whole. How astonishing, then, in Rusted Bells and Daisy Baskets for the granularity of real life in its many sidedness and frilly fractures to be not so much consumed raw as restored anew. Biography becomes puzzle pieces; colonial art stands naked; the Blind Boys of Alabama rub up against the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. This poet’s brainwaves, as generous and complex as the American histories it lovingly evokes, makes me dizzy with pleasure.
—Adam Fitzgerald, author of The Late Parade and director of The Home School
Notes
Page 4 “Self Portrait as Pinky Driving Down Tropical Trail”
A character sketch for the protagonist of a short story loosely based on my cat, Pinky, who at the time lived with a neutered male cat, Nico, who offered no relief when she was in heat.
Page 7 how I imagine the east coast of Flor- / -da remembers its past with Africa.
“Geologists have found rock patterns below Senegal and Sierra Leone that match rock patterns below Florida like the two sides of a ripped dollar bill.” Michael Grunwald. The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. New York: Simon, 2006. 374.
Page 12 Enclosed in Hose’s Gentle Rain
“The days are bright and filled with pain / Enclose me in your gentle rain.” The Doors. “The Crystal Ship.” The Doors, 1967.
Page 13 all that I’d need in life
“I never thought that I would find / All that I need in life.” Soul for Real. “Candy Rain.” Candy Rain, 1994.
Page 14 Repose in Light
“‘Repose in light can be—tends to be—peace through light, light that appeases and gives peace; but repose in light is also repose—deprivation of all external help and impetus—so that nothing comes to disturb, or to pacify, the pure movement of the light. … Repose in light: is it sweet appeasement through light? Is it the difficult deprivation of oneself and of all of one’s own movement, a position in the light without repose? Here two infinitely different experiences are separated by almost nothing.’” Maurice Blanchot quoted by Mary Ruefle. “Poetry and the Moon.” Madness, Rack, and Honey. Seattle: Wave Books, 2012. 30.
Page 15 Gator Takes Travel Cues from Janie and Tea Cake
For more on how Zora Neale Hurston uses Florida geography in her novel, see “Naturalism and the Florida Setting in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.” Andrea Panzeca. <http://www.ualberta.ca/~aizen/excavatio/archives/v24.html>
Page 15 gator generations despise, / like the Marjories did, the onetime majority / / view
Thanks also to Marjorie Harris Carr for leading the successful effort to stop the Cross Florida Barge Canal.
Page 16 Portrait of the Artist […] / […] Observing / an Indian Maiden at Her Bath
Magnolia woodcut by Pierre Joseph Landry viewed at New Orleans Museum of Art.
Page 16 till you found one that pleased you?
Inspired by Jody Stark, who “sent men out to the swamp to cut the finest and straightest cypress post they could find, and kept sending them back to hunt another one until they found one that pleased him.” Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper, 2006. 44.
Page 17 Someone first borrowed you
Isadora Duncan’s My Life. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1928.
Page 20 From the clean streets, where homeless people slept
When recording Le Show from Santa Monica Harry Shearer calls it “the home for the homeless.”
Page 23 (heteronormative …
Inspired by “deductive reasoning joke” whereby Boudreaux correctly deduces Thibodeaux has a house, wife, and kids because he has a lawnmower, but then (presumably incorrectly) deduces Robichaux is gay because he doesn’t have one.
… lawn order)
“Law and order could be seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans.” Lydia Davis. “A Mown Lawn.” 2001.
Page 23 Dikes built / to kill mosquitoes crushed cleansing / wetlands
“By creating permanent impoundments behind the dikes, the entire salt marsh flooding regimen was transformed. The broomgrass could not withstand constant flooding and was replaced by thick shrubs. Impounding also changed the salt marsh to mostly fresh water, as the brackish Indian and Banana Rivers were kept at bay and rain filled the impoundments. This change to fresh water encouraged the growth of cattails. The cattails and shrubby growth, in turn, ushered in their own animal clientele. The heretofore scarce red-winged blackbird became common on Merritt Island, as did the aggressive boat-tailed grackle. The land of broomgrass and open salt marsh became a series of shallow, stagnant freshwater ponds.” Mark Jerome Walters. A Shadow and A Song: The Struggle to Save an Endangered Species. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007. 31–32.
Page 23 skeeter eggs need both / to soak and sunbathe
“Mosquitoes laid their eggs in the mud of the broomgrass flats surrounding the island exposed at low tide. The eggs incubated for three days, and then after a high tide or rain, hatched to liberate the larvae, which took flight as adults a week later. From spring through fall, with high tides or rain often following dry periods, the mosquitoes were at their worst. After a heavy rain, a single acre of Merritt Island salt marsh could produce fifty million mosquitoes.” ibid. 25.
Page 23 Each drop, each drop— / Each drop, each drop—
Inspired by “And you, and you— / And you, and you—” Suji Kwock Kim. “Occupation.” Notes from the Divided Country: Poems. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2003. 19.
Page 26 Essayons
essay (noun, verb): to attempt or try
Essayons (“Let us try”): motto of the US Army Corps of Engineers