New World

From an "e;uncommonly fluent"e; and "e;rewarding"e; poet (The Observer), a collection of miniature epics that asks: can grace be found amid disarray?The New World, Anthony Carelli's new collection of poems, is an American travelogue that unfolds in a series of darkly comic episodes, with allusions to Dante as a thread throughout. In these epics in miniature, we meet a pilgrim-poet as he awaits the arrival of his child, a would-be Columbus, on the shores of a land "e;disenstoried"e; by explorers present and past. It's a land and a people largely lost in mindscapes and mythscapes, haunted by sketchy aspirational visions, misbegotten misremembering, and emptiness. Nonetheless, the poet steps out to the shore to sing for the child-and reader-to do what Columbus never did: "e;land gently. / And listen and / listen and listen / and stay."e; Constantly unsettling the rhetoric of inherited forms, the poet shaping these poems is always bound to the pilgrim, who cannot pretend to dissolve our purgatories but can only invite us-as a latter-day Virgil would-deeper into the uncanny encounters that encircle us. From an Arizona nursing home and a grandmother's memory of a stolen golden Schwinn in the occupied Philippines, to a tale of road-tripping west through Pennsylvania as sunrise transpires in the wrong sky, The New World opens strange spaces for us to re-see, lament, and re-sing the stories we tell.