Poetry. This is a double collection of playful and surprisingly moving poems rooted in a theme of circus life. THE BOOK OF CLOWN BABY explores the fantasy existence of Gerry LaFemina's character, Clown Baby. Occupied by visions of trick horses, parades and high-wire acts, Clown Baby relates the fantastic to the common reality where he finds himself. Similarly, in the Figures, LaFemina, with his profound gift for image, captures the wonder of the big top, as imagined and recreated in children's play. Gerry LaFemina's poetry collection THE PARAKEETS OF BROOKLYN received the 2003 Bordighera Prize in Poetry and was published in a bi-lingual edition of English and Italian. Among his honors are prizes from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships from the Irving Gilmore Emerging Artist Foundation and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. The former editor of the literary journal Controlled Burn, LaFemina now co-edits with poet Dennis Hinrichsen Review Revue, a journal of reviews, interviews and prosody essays. Currently he directs the Frostburg Center for Creative Writing at Frostburg State University where he is an Assistant Professor of English.

The Book of Clown Baby / Figures from The Big Time Circus Book

Literature & Fiction

LaFemina, Gerry

Poetry

Mayapple Press

Poetry. Following in the tradition of Larry Levis's Winter Stars, Gerry LaFemina's GRAFFITI HEART presents a collection of elegies and love poems cutting across American and personal landscapes and moving between urban adolescence and small-town adulthood through deft meditation and lyric observation. With long, sweeping lines and introspective interrogation, LaFemina places himself at a crossroads of American poetry, Americana. These are poems that remind us of how intensely personal the art form can be and how it can transcend the personal, making poetry matter by presenting not confessional autobiography, but moments of a life that could belong to any of us.

Graffiti Heart

Mammoth Books

Named for the water towers that bloom on the rooftops of Manhattan, Gerry LaFemina's Steam Punk is a missal for the celebrants of that city. With their punk hymns and their angels of the profane, these poems remind us "that it's all about belief in the end," even if what we put our faith in remains, like Manhattan itself, in a constant state of flux.

SteamPunk

Smalls Books/Red Lashes Productions

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.

Little Heretic

Stephen F. Austin University Press

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.

Palpable Magic

Essays & Correspondence

After the War for Independence

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.

The Window Facing Winter (Green Rose)

New Issues Poetry and Prose

Fiction. Part punk rock concept album, part poetic observation, and part man-in-the-street reporting, WISH LIST, Gerry LaFemina's debut collection of stories, chronicles the lives of people who just might be someone you know. His characters--alienated teens, mid-life crisis adults, those suffering from loss or from love--are survivors of the ordinary traumas of America. Sometimes funny, sometimes tender, sometimes heartbreaking, these stories invite us into a world that those familiar with LaFemina's poems will know: one willed with pathos and grit.

Wish List

Contemporary

Marick Press

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

Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping: Prose Poems

History & Criticism

Madville Publishing

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.

The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness

Health, Fitness & Dieting

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Books by LaFemina, Gerry