distributed by UPNE

Tina Celona's darkly lucid, lightly comic poems are unusually explicit in their attentiveness to the primacy of poetry as a natural force, a force akin to that of the tides or their correlative lunar cycle. Describing in clear, unabstracted terms such elements of the quotidian as war, freedom, dream, "Satisfaction," and imagination, Celona invokes poems and their poet with the same degree of focused intensity as she does more obvious, more conventionally useful objects such as Singer sewing machines, shrimp, straw, driveways, corpses. The result is not so much an elevation as a leveling, a tableau of meaning in which the poet and her poems achieve a plastic, spatial, significant reality on the luxuriously detailed plateau of the natural world: "The cliffs of the / seabed the / Poem twisting like a / Tornado over the / Plains of the interior / Decoration".

Endorsements:

“Skewed, ajitter, sui generis--the hyper, cyberized world as if viewed through an old Bell and Howell home movie camera on the fritz, its motor at quarter speed and burning out, the lens blurred and cracked. And what an odd, disturbing, startling world Tina Celona's poems provide.”—August Kleinzahler

“Tina Celona's poems unite the contraries of perception (the ‘real moon’) and imagination (‘the moon in my poem’), to realize The Real Moon of Poetry. This allows her free rein in both realms (‘my dream and my body’) since, after all, they are one. With her keen eye and fine sense of rhythm, she can include a chaotic world, a vague family, a difficult farm, a singular loneliness--all in what sometimes seems a side glance. This is a fine collection and, one fervently hopes, only a beginning.”—Keith Waldrop

From the Book:

PASTORALE

Let us look at it another way. The scream seemed to come from across the meadow. Taking our notebooks, we set out across the field, turning over stones, looking for the source of the scream. We wrote, a thing has screamed. The screaming continued. We wrote, the screaming continues. Under our feet the grass, the grass of the horse-field, caused us to stumble. We stumble, we wrote, walking across the field. The horses, in the woods by the water, moved uneasily towards the road. A car went by, then another. Another goes by in the poem. A car goes by. The river is still, a light wind touches it, a few leaves float down from the trees.

Awards/Recognition:

Alberta Prize 2002

TINA BROWN CELONA was born in 1974 to an American Foreign Service officer and his Vietnamese wife. She grew up in Tokyo, Paris, Kuala Lumpur, and Washington, DC. She received degrees from Brown University and the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. Her husband is the poet Matt Celona. Fence Books published The Real Moon of Poetry and Other Poems in 2002. Magazine publications include Octopus, Shampoo, La Petite Zine and Puppyflowers. Her poems have appeared in Explosive!, Epoch and Fence. She lives in Seattle, WA.

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