Gritty, hilarious, and sometimes heartbreaking, the correspondence of cowgirls Calamity Wronsky and Belle Bendall articulates the strength, humor, passion, and compassion that are the essence of women's lives - north, south, east, or west. In the spirit of Thelma and Louise on horseback, this eclectic correspondence speaks to the frontier woman in all of us with a mix of letters, poems, pie charts, and even new lyrics to use with favorite old songs. From the stuff cowgirl dreams are made of (a guy who looks like Clint Black and a new palomino pony) to the reality of women's lives ("A penny saved is probably just gonna be borrowed by somebody like your little sister Beverly for gettin' herself unpregnant. . ."), these women of the West impart wisdom and truth with a sharp-shooting cowgirl twist. Get a glimpse of Calamity during "The Kennedy Years" when she and Belle were dating Bobby-Ted and Jack, or hear her tale that familiarly begins, "Hell, Belle, you'd think with all my worldliness in terms of men I'd a been wise to him from the start..." Soak in Calamity's Advice to the Lovelorn, and learn why Elizabeth Taylor and Whoopi Goldberg are cowgirls and Jerry Hall and Madonna are not. Dear Calamity... Love, Belle is an epistolary novel that proves women really do know life's little instructions better than men.

Dear Calamity . . . Love, Belle

Wronsky, Gail

Crown

Poems of India in all their attention to sensuous detail, vibrancy and celebration.

Blue Shadow Behind Everything Dazzling (The Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Hollyridge Press

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated into Spanish by Alicia Partnoy. Characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream float into and out of contemporary landscapes contemplating love, art, language, and otherness in mischievous and serious ways. Here "quick bright things" "come to confusion" but often to tenderness and understanding. Alicia Partnoy's inspired translations uncover surprising surreal beauty and cross-cultural insight.

So Quick Bright Things

United States

What Books Press

Poetry. Art. Sci-fi Studies. TOMORROW YOU'LL BE ONE OF US is a collection of poems composed entirely of dialogue from sci-fi movies of the 50s and early 60s, each poem accompanied by an apt and witty illustration. Succinct, resonant, hilarious, and space-age, this is a book that celebrates an era of filmmaking and at the same time creates something entirely new.

Tomorrow You'll Be One of Us

ROSENTHAL, CHUCK

Whether paying tribute to literary icons such as Walt Whitman and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or examining global and cultural degradation, Wronsky proves to be a poet of sharp wit and endearing wonder. The crowning jewel of Dying for Beauty is "Desdemona," a nearly book-length lyric that alternates between meditation and dramatization, between discourse and incantation. "I started out thinking I was writing an elegy for the earth - from my own self, in my own neighborhood, with its crack addicts and war-like helicopters, its poverty and ?lthiness…And yet also, here I was with a new daughter and this love in me, equal to nothing else."
"Formally, the poem ['Desdemona'] brings into its amplitude and openness material that could be inert, but is lifted always by rhythmic urgency and a faultless, inventive music.…Wronsky is also trying to think through the poem, reason passionately through its issues of language, gender, fear and loss."-The Boston Review
Gail Wronsky received a BA and an MFA from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. She is the author of two books of poetry and teaches at Loyola-Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Dying for Beauty, Poems.

Copper Canyon Press

"Any other poet with Gail Wronsky’s gift for sheer gorgeousness―for the sensuous image, for shapeliness, for the ever-unfolding ever-mobile vocal line―would call it a day. But Wronsky’s intellect is of a larger order: restless, irreverent, wittily attuned to the force-fields of cultural fashion and to the depths those fashions bespeak. How heartening to see trenchant critique and passionate endorsement so fully intertwined! Poems for Infidels is a celebrant’s book, “guilty . . . of beauty” and, resoundingly, of faith."―Linda Gregerson

POEMS FOR INFIDELS

Red Hen Press

<div>A collaboration by a legendary artist and a writer hailed by David St. John as "a poet of lasting beauty and relentless invention" &nbsp; Gronk was raised in East Los Angeles and lives in downtown LA. Gail Wronsky was raised in suburban Detroit and lives in the hippie haven of Topanga Canyon. But as artists they have found common ground--a shared commitment to the offbeat and the beautiful, to the slightly absurd and the slyly surreal, to blurring the distinction between our inner lives of dreams and imagination and our daily realities. Wronsky's poems and Gronk's drawings are equally grounded in poetic imagery. Wronsky mixes vernacular diction, or spoken language, with a more formal style in a way that is entirely unique; Gronk's signature style alludes to both street art and classical art. Both are committed to making memorable work that surprises and delights, that sharpens and feeds our everyday lives as well as our deepest selves.</div>

The Stranger You Are: Art by Gronk

Tia Chucha

This book collects over four decades of work by this unique and imaginative poet. Wronsky's poems, informed by her reading of classical texts as well as contemporary poetics, explore feminism, environmentalism, and mortality in language that is both multi-layered and musical. At times dark and at times humorous, her poems speak to our strengths as well as our frailties.

Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems

White Pine Press

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Books by Wronsky, Gail