Books
THE NEW ECONOMY
Copper Canyon Press, October 14, 2025
ISBN-10:1556597215 / ISBN-13 978-1556597213
Pre-order from your local bookshop / Pre-order from Copper Canyon
From the publisher: The New Economy memorializes the world's pleasures and perils told through the point of view of an aging, ungendered body. A devotional to the ungendered vessel as it ages, dreams, and survives. A practice of radical collaboration, failure, and renewal. A world of “Miss You” poems opening a portal to all those we’ve lost and would love to visit for a while. In Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s latest collection, The New Economy, poems are haunted by the ghosts of loved ones and childhood memories, by changing landscapes and bodies. Calvocoressi’s own figure is examined—investigating the desire to protect the body one is born with and the longing to have been born in another. Cisterns sing with the musicality of a poet who understands both the power of sound and silence—those quiet spaces inviting us to consider the words we cannot hear. “The days I don’t kill myself are extraordinary” one poems says. “Why don’t we have a name for it?” Lyrical and unafraid, The New Economy invites us to name our fears and sorrows, to write to who or what has left us, to create practices that can hold both the darkness and light of this (in)finite life.
Praise for Gabrielle Calvocoressi
"Calvocoressi resists the limitations of language―especially where gender is concerned―to more fully capture the experience of a self "unlimited in its possibilities.” . . . These poems balance wildness and control in a fearless treatment of eros, identity, trauma, and all that resists easy categorization. The voice encompasses the colloquial as well as the high lyrical… When particular forms aren’t up to the task of rendering something with tender and unflinching attentiveness, Calvocoressi reaches outside of poetry altogether: 'Oh. It. Was. Beautiful. No metaphor will do.'"—Publishers Weekly
"Gabrielle Calvocoressi is one of those writers I love so much that I look at bookstores' shelves hoping she's written a new book. Now she has, and the pleasure of these new poems about gender, God, loss, joy, politics, love and the struggle for meaning in language and in this difficult moment in the United States are all here for us- and we're richer for it. Go find what's lush, what's troublesome, what's an invitation to your own path in this magnificent new collection." —Rebecca Solnit
"She is a daring act as a poet/athlete . . . but she can also travel the backwoods, pointing out herons, ivy vines and creek water with a kind of divining rod rightness. . . . Her wild lyrics shudder and shine, jubilant and threatening, exuberant.” —Carol Muske-Dukes, The Huffington Post
"I did not want this book to end. It is wide open, vulnerable, and seductive—the most compelling thing I have read this year, without contest, and so very timely.” —Sarah Warren, World Literature Today
"An excoriation of present-day America by a new and lethal commentator." —Times Literary Supplement
ROCKET FANTASTIC
Winner of The Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Persea Books | 2017 | ISBN 978-0-89255-485-0 | 92 pages
From the publisher: Like nothing before it, Rocket Fantastic transfigures the landscape and language of gender and the body. Its poems are populated by figures both familial and fabular: a prodigal brother and a relentless father; the Hermit, Dowager, and Major General; and, perhaps most strikingly, the Bandleader, embodiment of sexual, capitalistic, and political dominance. Mythic and musical, erogenous yet wide-eyed, this is a dazzling book by a space-age troubadour of American poetry.
Praise for Rocket Fantastic
“A dance of self-discovery, subverting our assumptions of gender and the body. . . . Both innovative and sensual, Rocket Fantastic is a vital book for our time.” —Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle
“I did not want this book to end. It is the most compelling thing I have read this year, without contest, and so very timely.” —Sarah Warren, World Literature Today
“A vertiginous, wondering, painful, uncannily and deeply sexy book.” —Maureen N. McLane
APOCALYPTIC SWING
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
Persea Books | Paperback | $15.00 | ISBN 978-0-89255-412-6 | 96 pages
From the publisher: Battered but never beaten, this narrator finds salvation in ecstatic communion with the gods of jazz and especially boxing: “O Tommy Hearns, O blood come down,” she prays. “Find your way to Hungerford where my/father glowers over me. Show him/how the bag does penance.” In such prayers she finds the strength to survive the home she has to leave and, once she does, the strength to face the fires she finds flaring the country over, from Los Angeles to Laramie. Apocalyptic Swing is a work of unbelievable force, a devastating and glorious testimony about America―its lore, disappointments, and promise.
Praise for Apocalyptic Swing
“Calvocoressi is a daring act as a poet/athlete. . . Her wild lyrics shudder and shine, jubilant and threatening, exuberant.”
—Carol Muske-Dukes, The Huffington Post
“Muscular and musical, this second collection from Calvocoressi combines boxing, Elvis, church burnings, sex and horses to produce a book that is pure Americana. . . . This is a compelling sophomore effort from a very promising poet.”
—Publishers Weekly
THE LAST TIME I SAW AMELIA EARHART
Winner of the 2006 Connecticut Book Award
Persea Books | 2005 / Paperback | $15.95 | ISBN 978-0-89255-315-0 | 68 pages
From the publisher: Gabrielle Calvocoressi uses her prodigious gifts of imagination and empathy to give voice to the hope and heartbreak of small-town America. In painstaking, vernacular verse, she conveys the ambitions and failings of a distraught populace.
Praise for The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart
“Calvocoressi brings keen and sympathetic attention to the local disasters the larger world has often overlooked.”
—Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review
“An excoriation of present-day America by a new and lethal commentator.”
—Times Literary Supplment
“Remarkable . . . teas[es] meaning out of a past. . .that still dogs us.”
—Sarah Goodyear, Time Out New York