Overview

"From a diverse, working-class Queens neighborhood emerge Joe Benevento's coming-of-age poems of promise, misconnection, and loss. Yearnings that are undone by youthful awkwardness, peer pressure, the strictures of grownups, happenstance, and the passage of time, as when chipping collected rocks in the cellar of a boyhood friend and ""... aware almost anything / could happen. This very next rock might shine / flecks of gold or hopeful bits of green beryl precious / to us, cementing our friendship on the dusty cellar / floor, until time, like someone's tidy mother, / would discard the evidence forever."" Benevento reminds us that each passage of life is a coming-of-age; each entailing the acquisition of mixed memories; each providing a bittersweet bonding with time itself. Mark Belair"

Full Product Details

9781957840031

Table of Contents

Reviews

"In these remarkable poems, Benevento continues his laser-like depiction of the blue-collar, Italian-American culture of his Queens childhood, coming of age, and subsequent adulthood spent in other locales, and he does so with subtle verbal artistry honed to near perfection. His seemingly simple diction and the propulsive ""stories"" of his narratives belie not only the assured poetic skill of an experienced poet but also the uncanny insight and hard-earned wisdom of a life fully lived. Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, Member, Texas Institute of Letters The poetic voice in Joe Benevento's The Cracker Box Poems often reminds one of Walt Whitman's autobiographical expansiveness in its sheer embrace of experience. At the same time, the compelling plot lines of many narrative poems can as readily evoke Raymond Chandler (Benevento, also a master of detective fiction, mentions Chandler in a powerful poem about getting lost). Incisive, revelatory endings for all poems approach perfection, in a modern equivalent of Shakespeare's epigrammatic sonnet endings. All in all, the poetic art that a reader is immersed in in this highly original and compelling collection is Benevento's alone. Lee Slonimsky, author of Bright Yellow Buzz and Pythagoras in Love From a diverse, working-class Queens neighborhood emerge Joe Benevento's coming-of-age poems of promise, misconnection, and loss. Yearnings that are undone by youthful awkwardness, peer pressure, the strictures of grownups, happenstance, and the passage of time, as when chipping collected rocks in the cellar of a boyhood friend and ""... aware almost anything / could happen. This very next rock might shine / flecks of gold or hopeful bits of green beryl precious / to us, cementing our friendship on the dusty cellar / floor, until time, like someone's tidy mother, / would discard the evidence forever."" Benevento reminds us that each passage of life is a coming-of-age; each entailing the acquisition of mixed memories; each providing a bittersweet bonding with time itself. Mark Belair, author of the companion works, Stonehaven and Edgewood"

Author Information

Joe Benevento grew up in a large, Italian American family in a racially diverse, working-class neighborhood in Queens; a fictionalized version of his times appears in his 2004 YA novel, The Odd Squad, which was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Benevento went on to major in Spanish and English at NYU, where he graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, before attaining an MA degree in English at Ohio State and a Ph.D. in English at Michigan State. Since 1983 he has taught American literature (including Latinx and Latin American literature in translation), creative writing and Mystery at Truman State University. He is also the long time poetry editor of the Green Hills Literary Lantern. Benevento's poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in over 300 journals and magazines, including Bilingual Review, Slipstream, Cold Mountain Review, Switchback, South Dakota Review, Prairie Schooner, Italian Americana and Poets & Writers. He has fourteen books to his credit, including Expecting Songbirds: Selected Poems, 1983-2015. Benevento and his wife Carol live in Kirksville, Missouri, where they have raised four children, Maria, Joseph, Claire, and Margaret.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available