A Vertigo Book

$18.00

By Carolyn Guinzio

Winner of the Tenth Gate Prize

Guinzio’s riveting triptych, A Vertigo Book, opens a keyhole of stylized and radiant insight into female interiorities—a reclamation of lost, overlooked, or sidelined subjectivities illuminated by an empathic eye and deft linguistic verve. In the first section, V—an elderly widow who sings at church masses—uses her voice, and the daily accumulation of her thoughts and perceptions, to push against the encroachments of silence, absence, and physical diminishment. Whereas V manifests as an act of additive sculpture, she is contrasted in the third section of the book by the subtractive sculpture used to reveal the character of Jenny Mentink—an early 20th century Dutch immigrant whose selfhood is carved out by the silences of exile and the erasures of being a non-native language speaker—via taut fragments and brief glimpses of details, moments, images. These interiorities are bridged by a middle section titled Fault, an elaboration of fractures, interstices, liminal spaces, and borderlands—a series of hauntings that linger within the twilight of mediations bridging self and other, lover and beloved, language and the thing itself. Carolyn Guinzio is a poet of exceptional artistry and originality, and A Vertigo Book is a stunningly beautiful book of piercing luminosity.
—Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50

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About Carolyn Guinzio

Carolyn Guinzio’s previous books include Spoke & Dark, winner of the To the Lighthouse/A Room of Her Own Prize; How Much of What Falls Will Be Left When It Gets to the Ground? and the visual poems Ozark Crows. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and many other journals.

 

Praise for A Vertigo Book

Carolyn Guinzio’s A Vertigo Book reads like a condensed novel in three parts. We have “V,” a woman alone at the end of a life, her “light skeleton” nearly lifting “right up off the earth.” V’s loneliness is our loneliness, yet Guinzio describes her with such care, we find ourselves mesmerized, keeping intimate company with the details of her almost-not life: snow, deer, apple, mirror, lake. It “hurts us to see,” but we want to see, to find out how it is there at the very edge of being. When we leave her, it’s to draw even closer to Guinzio’s impeccably observant eye. She enters the natural world with all the passionate attention of a lover, and we follow. In a final staccato section, we find Jenny Mentink, a settler somewhere in America’s prairie. How is Jenny’s story also V’s? How might their lostness be America’s lostness? “What ground is this?” they ask, we ask, as we enter the long American story of un-belonging to this land that holds us only briefly.
—Julie Carr, author of Real Life: An Installation

With its intricately shaped sounds and silences, A Vertigo Book is a moving collection full of numinous singing at the lyric verges of existence and departure. Carolyn Guinzio renders the interior in ways that seek connection across the sundry textures that form our sense of a life, proving poetry’s ability to advance not an idea about intimacy but the thing itself. “Someone will pick / up where we left / off, catching a breath / as it trails away into / not nothingness / but being,” concludes one of these tremendous poems. Indeed, Guinzio’s exquisite vantages and syntaxes for witness call readers to attune their own looking and listening for new beliefs in contact.
—Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler

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