Kirjahaku

Little Heretic presents one person’s pilgrimage back to the New York of his youth, where the City is seen not for the ghosts of junkies, musicians and ex-lovers that haunt it, but for the spiritual and creative possibility lurking in alleys and parks, and celebrated by street corner buskers and subway graffiti. A twenty-first century poet in New York, this book looks at how in the right light of a Manhattan morning, a pigeon flying across First Avenue just might be one of Rilke’s angels.

Palpable Magic features re-readings and reviews of such late 20th Century poets as Anne Sexton, Larry Levis, Charles Wright, Patricia Goedicke, and Wendell Berry, as well as provides commentaries on poetic craft, the prose poem, and what it means to be a poet.LaFemina’s musings on poetry are fascinating and curious; the re-readings are not old grounds covered in old measures but as poems and books seen fresh, candidly, sometimes irreverently but always respectfully.LaFemina is a shrewd critic, and these essays cause us to become necessarily inquisitive and curious. He shows his readers, time and again, that poetry is magical, intense, and necessary to our lives.

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the English into Italian by Elisa Biagini. Winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize. "What draws me to Gerry LaFemina's poems is how much of the world they contain: Brooklyn streets, race-tracks, Vietnam, a boy's imagined transgressions, family dramas. What is compelling is the tension between the speaker's urge to understand and the mystery that resists explanation the partial understandings, the misunderstandings of childhood.... Public and private collide, intersect, as events and images become more difficult to reconcile, to describe. LaFemina's poems ripple with erotic desire, the budding sexuality of young boys, the lure of the nape hidden under a woman's hair, the interiority of the boy who'd slid into the sleeve of the dark suit left by his father. It's a rich world...a gritty and tender gamble" Donna Masini."

Poetry. "In THE WINDOW FACING WINTER, the urgency of the beautiful andsometimes murderous urban landscape, set alongside the seductive, intricateoasis of the Japanese garden, renders possible a vision into 'sliver ofthe absolute.' With unflinching accuracy, LaFemina delivers a sacred, ifmomentary, world, laying bare its essential loneliness, its obstinatebeauty" --Robin Behn.

A story collection that comes with a poetic sensibility.

Anyone in the mood to be enchanted by a collection of prose poems that celebrate the quotidian, the commonplace, the ordinary things of this world--those "dumb beautiful messengers," as Walt Whitman famously referred to them in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"? Then you best pick up a copy of Gerry LaFemina's book Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping.... LaFemina offers a] kind of precision with language--making a "place" into a "thing" and conveying its feel, look, and impression on the soul with such searing clarity.... his poems] enchant the senses and succeed in stopping time . . . so that we might examine the things of this world with love and intelligence, so that we might hear them speak to us again.--Janet Lowery, editor of By the Light of a Neon Moon

It's CNF (Creative Nonfiction). Like the Stones' Exile on Main Street, it's a hodge-podge: memoir, philosophy, lit crit, pop culture, history, and reflection. Gerry calls it a meditation. It really is an essay in the French way of being a trial or an experiment.