Overview

A raging prairie fire in the dead of night kicks off this tale of murder and retribution between two large landowners whose properties are conjoined by a deepwater well that each claims to own. Set in 1920s rural America and unfolding in alternating episodes of free and blank verse, a propulsive narrative emerges that evokes the darkest works of Faulker, Poe, and Robinson Jeffers.

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Reviews

The Well is a major poem, one that sets forth with the kind of profound intentions that are rare in today's poetry-think of the physical and moral landscape of Robinson Jeffers, the nakedness before fate of Greek tragedy-and achieves its aims splendidly, revealing Glen Vecchione as a poet equal to this daunting task he has accepted for his art. The Well's accomplishment lies not so much in the story that it tells, although told masterfully, as in the tenuous hope it offers that form, be it social or poetic, might contain human violence and elemental chaos. Inside this ""hellscape / of charred cottonwood and hourglass-shaped eddies / thick with the down-fruiting of dandelion purr,"" it is the illuminant gravity of Vecchione's language that gives us grounding and possibility, then in the inevitable desire to read again. -James Owens, author of Mortalia and Family Portrait with Scythe A short story's not a squashed novel and a poem's not an abbreviated story, but Glen Vecchione's compressed episodic sequence of poems, The Well, tells a tale worthy of Poe or Robinson Jeffers-gothic, haunting, and weird, in the best sense of that word. The silences that surround it are filled with implication. In terms of scale and implication, the well in question may be shallow, but what it gives comes from a considerable depth. -Robert Wrigley, author of The True Account of Myself as a Bird Glen Vecchione's narrative poem, The Well, set in the American Midwest sometime in the early twentieth century, is visceral, carnal, and mythic. The poem employs five traditional forms in its telling, including sestina rigida and pantoum, to create dream-like hypnotic repetitions of key words and phrases that conjure a rhythmic, miasmic horror never explicitly revealed but impossible to dismiss. It is a haunting, masterful performance. -Edison Jennings, author of Intentional Fallacies

Author Information

Glen P. Vecchione, who also writes under the name Glen Peters, is the author of 28 commercial science, math, and history books that have been translated into several languages and distributed throughout the world. His poetry is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, and he has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Chautauqua Review, Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, and Missouri Review. Glen, who studied under the poet and critic Douglas Fiero at UCLA, won the 2023 Editor's Choice Award in Last Stanza Journal and was the featured poet in Sequestrum's ""Wonder"" issue, January 2024. Currently, Glen divides his time between the California desert and Umbria, Italy. (glenvecchione.com)

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