Poetry. The Red Dress is a series of deliciously poised, witty, often amorous poems by Billie Chernicoff, a poet who has received the highest praise from her fellow-poets and readers alike. "THE RED DRESS: CHARMS TROUBLED & AMOROUS, by Billie Chernicoff, brings to mind an afternoon spent in a botanical garden of the old world: a Venetian garden of earthly delights, of rare carnivorous and medicinal plants, of opium poppy blossoms and lush mystery. This lovely collection of poems guides us through a woman's sensual and full life."&mdash;Brenda Coultas "For all of the resonant, bewitching talismans of the old world and gathered leaves her poems proffer, for all the lovers that inhabit these rooms, Chernicoff is too wise to get lost in the lustres of the materials&mdash;however beguiling or charged. THE RED DRESS works as a kind of tarot, shifting dimensions, spheres, and earthly elements as it unwraps the soul stuff. Folio of all your faces I wed is a poet (and seeker's) electrifying vow."&mdash;Kimberly Lyons "In her slow, slender lines she invites collusion with the reader's breath, so we find ourselves breathing along with the text, startled by what she's just made us say. She leads us into a sensuous world of vivid, unsentimental love, love not just for bodies but for moves and circumstances."&mdash;Robert Kelly

The Red Dress (Dr. Cicero Books Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Chernicoff, Billie

Poetry

Dr. Cicero Books

Poetry. "Chernicoff gives us a world set to work, process as alchemy, the chaos within order she manifests with her patient and alert naming 'Of.' She's not shapeshifting but involving us in the radical force of language that is the world. The child of Cupid and Psyche speaking at once from within, and beyond."—Tamas Panitz "The poems in WATERS OF are amazing lyrics that explore themes of change and the continual transformation of the present. These poems quietly build and flow, exploring the natural world, myths, the alchemical, different alphabets, literatures and cultures. Time and the changeable nature of life and all materials are at the center of this book; here Chernicoff's poems exemplify this transmutation in the accretions of her lines and images where each word is a drop 'at the root of all things.' In WATERS OF, the poet's capacious imagination and intelligence meet at the threshold where everything is possible.—Eléna Rivera "Almagest enough at last! For me, the greatest gift of WATERS OF is that it offers a way to hear all of history as just a complicated mechanism for us to make thous of each other, an attempt to bridge the huge gaps between the orders of our feelings. We get 'lost in streets whose leaves turn bronze / like the words of God,' and 'It takes heat to move / the sound of one / syllable / into what you can see / or touch,' but this book points a way home to water. Billie Chernicoff remembers the color into seeing, welcomes an ox into the house of the alphabet. When I read these poems, I feel a weird, thrilling awakeness. They sing the raucous music of who we've been."—Ian Dreiblatt

Waters Of

Lunar Chandelier Collective

"Exhilarating freedom and subtle command, lyric surprise and an electric movement of mind - all that and more runs through every line of Billie Chernicoff's MINOR SECRETS, The erotic splendor of her theologies and the ferociously gentle magic of her music yield a strange and ancient newness as fresh as anything in American poetry today."--Peter Cole 
"The suites of poems and single gems in Billie Chernicoff's MINOR SECRETS test and fuse elegy, flirtation, quest and prayer. They tryst with visual and literary artists, Greek and Babylonian myth, fairy tales and Marian Christianity, the Tarot and the Torah. Formally diverse, playing across language and languages, the poems sound the depths of what makes us human..."--Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. 
Poetry.

Minor Secrets (Black Square Editions)

Black Square Editions

Poetry. "The poet reads things. And she knows them all, this poet of our precise and beautiful ordinary language. She handles them, fondles them even, with her eyes, eyes that traverse the salients and re-entrants of bronze artifacts with the fluid grace of a gymnast. That's what pleases me most in this wonderful poem, or book of poems, this living museum of human responses to human work--the quiet alertness of her breath, the way the lines let us travel with her perceptions, breathing for us almost, showing us how to see. Old bronze seen new. No hint of antiquarian scholarship here--the years fall away, leaving only the moss-green patina, time's only gift, green, color of Venus."--Robert Kelly "While Billie Chernicoff is a stunningly new poet, she is also one who brings multiple pasts &amp; presents into the work, with incredible grace and a feeling for image and sound that never lets up. Reading her now I sense the new and old worlds of my traditions and hers--ours--emerging through a voice that speaks genuine poetry as I want and need it. BRONZE is news that stays news, as someone once had it."--Jerome Rothenberg "Reading BRONZE, I am reminded of Charles Olson's notion of how 'the inner structure of language recapitulates the inner structure of the world.'...The poems project a slideshow of carefully etched images; a casting onto the mind through word and rhythm, a phanopoeia of the vessels and carvings. Indeed, the vector forces that come together to create these poems are in phase with one another--and it is with humor, sensuality, and play that they are revealed."--Kristin Prevallet "Here the unalloyed pleasure of significant soundings rubs up against the beauty of indestructible bronze, resulting in perfect pitch--ekphrasis as ecstasy, in vessels, busts, ewers, and urns, holding wine and song, ashes and a rumor, vanishing. These poems stick to the real like bronze sticks to the bone, 'and if you get cut / heal the blade.'"--David Levi Strauss

Bronze

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Books by Chernicoff, Billie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Chernicoff, Billie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Red Dress (Dr. Cicero Books Poetry)

Waters Of

Minor Secrets (Black Square Editions)

Bronze