Peter Dellolio
A BOX OF CRAZY TOYS
100 Liquid Landscapes
ISBN 10: 1-879378-93-0
ISBN 13: 9781879378933
107 pages, $15
Author Biography | Read Selection
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Is it possible that anything you can conceive, with any combination of words, can, in the fullness of time, manifest itself materially? Some such thought will be prompted by the reading of any of the 100 liquid landscapes in Peter Dellolio's surreal collection, A Box of Crazy Toys.
Italian-American Peter Dellolio is a poet, essayist and screenplay writer. He has been a contributing editor for NYArts Magazine, writing art and film reviews. He authored monographs on several new artists as well. He was co-publisher and editor-in-chief of Artscape2000, an award-winning art review e-zine. He has taught poetry and art for the LeAP expanded arts program in New York City. His paintings and 3D works are represented online. He lives in Brooklyn."I have tried to give the reader a meal of different meanings, to alter the ingredients of the recipes, to grow the vegetables in some exotic, rich and strange soil... Language, especially poetry, gives the imagination the upper hand because words allow us to see the invisible, the irrational, the bizarre and the impossible."
~ From the author's preface.
Reviews"A tiger with red clarinet legs requires that you handle him with kit gloves. Where do you find them? Frantic, you turn to this sparkling book, which is a compendium of keys to very serious issues. Everything in it is in disguise, but eager to have you find the key, which is shining, under something, waiting for you. Just for you."
~ Sam Eisenstein, author of Aliens, Gods and Artists
"Entering the world of Peter Dellolio is a walk along the bridge between charming and disturbing. To read his short forays into narrative poetry is to be immersed in the dreamscapes of another’s twisted mind. The sensations of imagery are as grotesque as they are marvelous: these are sensations disturbingly crystalline...Dellolio’s “box” appears to be in the same way a toolkit to showing readers what is possible through the mechanisms of an opened, unrepentant mind, a mind capable of agreeing to the extreme image and holding itself accountable to it as well...
I found myself laughing with these poems in ways I haven’t with poetry in some time. Despite the contentions the book aroused in my own understanding of a poetic present, this collection delivered modes of entertainment, aesthetic appreciation and a warmth toward fresh investigations of language."
Greg Bem, Yellow Rabbits Review #44
Selections
From A Box of Crazy Toys
Insect Jury
Insect jury. Implacable and
remote. Judge's bench made
from frozen sailor shirts.
The Defendant is a refrigerator
dressed in urine-soaked clown clothes.
The air in the courtroom gave
a transfusion to hand painted
vintage neck ties.
He Was AttackedHe was attacked by a chaotic cluster
of geometrical shapes. The ocean
found a trigonometry
book, and after a long night
of opium, pretended to be
trapezoids and pentagons.
Let's Go With the IdeaLet's go with the idea that present
past and future are like a strip of
celluloid it is always there always unfurling
so Caruso is still singing two hundred
feet back and your baby is using a
walker three hundred feet forward the film
like time and space has no finite line
of demarcation now W.D. Fields' juggling
pins spin in the glare of the movie lights
while the opening chord of A Hard Day's Night
resonates under the shell of the Hollywood
Bowl and the intoxicating aromas of all the
Salumerias in 1914 Little Italy mersmerize
the senses even thought the buildings
and the food and the people who shopped in 2014
are no longer on that part of the film.
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