An Easy Place / To DieVincent A. Cellucci
ISBN 978-1-936328-03-1
6x9 Trade Pbk, 100 pp.
Retail: $12.95
Purchase from Amazon.comAn Easy Place / To Die is a poetic journey through New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The first section wakes with city, culture, and mythmaking as introductions into poetry and a life. The second section wanders through the social world, specifically the defenses and offenses of lovemaking. The third section is intensely personal and examines uncontrollable events. For the penultimate section, the lyric returns as an elixir to extinction and the book climatically concludes with a long, projective finale that emphasizes presence. These poems spring out of the "nagbu," or well of poetic history, specifically the tragedy of Gilgamesh, answer Eliot's The Wasteland, and allude to both as "beginning" and "ending" epic poems in the book's Joycean scaffolding.
“Vincent Cellucci’s poetry does not resemble anybody else’s, and I don’t mean by that just the poetry of his contemporaries. What he does with words is he makes them carry several kinds of speech in the most concise and musical manner. Among those kinds is a New Orleans jive known only to cooks and musicians, a fast talking rap with sharp glinting edges like a chef’s knife. The dude knows moves. Look for him in the big leagues.”
Andrei Codrescu
Editor, Exquisite Corpse
Author, Jealous Witness: New Poems
“Vincent Cellucci is a poet who pries open the fissures within words and syntax to release evanescent meanings we barely register before they dissipate.”
John Biguenet
Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor
Loyola University in New Orleans
Author, Rising Water and Shotgun
“In Vincent Cellucci’s first collection the question of how to speak of something (a place, a time, a situation), is really the question of how to live with it, and oneself.”
Laura Mullen
Poet and Professor
Louisiana State University
Author, Murmur
“These poems are the ghost signatura Rx for an ancient metropolis dying before our eyes, La Nouvelle-Orléans to be sure: ‘the bottom sunrise...and blood / suck mosquitos...pave your face...me gustaria muerta.’"
Dave Brinks
New Orleans Poet and Editor, YAWP
Author, The Caveat Onus
About the Poet
Vincent A. Cellucci is a traveling neologist. He received his MFA from Louisiana State University and went to Loyola University New Orleans for his bachelor’s degree in writing. He has been published in
Exquisite Corpse,
moira,
New Delta Review,
The Pedestal, and
Presa; he contributed, edited, and produced a collaborative audio novel entitled
The Katrina Decameron (2010); and he teaches communication in LSU’s College of Art + Design. In his spare time, he paints and scuba dives.
For additional author information please visit
www.vincentacellucci.com.
Contact InformationVincent A. Cellucci at
nahualnola@gmail.comCityLit Press at
info@citylitproject.orgCover DesignJonas Kyle-SidellExcerptRead an excerpt from
An Easy Place / To Die by clicking on the PDF link below.
Click here to download PDF
