Ghosts of the Upper Floor: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 3 by Tony Trigilio

There’s so much to admire in Tony Trigilio’s addictive new book (the third in his delicious Dark Shadows poetry soap opera): the obsessive vision, the light and dark of emotion, and the everyday world brushing eerily—sometimes hilariously—against the supernatural. Only a book so beautifully self-aware could wrench poetry from disastrous lines like: “experience a painful and hideous transformation from man to predatory animal.” Inside these love poems to baroque camp and fabulous melodrama is a haunting meditation on memory and the shadowy lenses through which we look back on the past while navigating the present. Trigilio shows us there’s nothing so small or obscure, or so wonderfully bad, that we can’t love it—in its entirety—into art.

—Aaron Smith

Tony Trigilio is burying himself alive. With every poetic sentence he dedicates to an episode of Dark Shadows, he delves deeper into the coffin that contains the gothic soap opera’s DVD set as well as his two-year-old self, whose nightmares from watching it with his mother reverberate across the ensuing decades. This “vanishing into ceaselessly flowing past lives” is both autobiographical exploration and escape from the carnage surrounding the speaker as the new millennium slouches from its cradle—the 9/11 attacks and subsequent endless wars, the Boston Marathon bombings, the U.S.’s descent into “petty dada kleptocracy,” along with the diseases and afflictions peeling away his loved ones. The result is a meticulously executed, compellingly urgent underworld journey, haunted and haunting.

—Joe Fletcher

Tony Trigilio is the author and editor of 12 books, including, most recently, Inside the Walls of My Own House (BlazeVOX [books]), the second volume of The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood). His books of poetry include White Noise (Apostrophe Books) and Historic Diary (BlazeVOX [books]), among others. His selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He is also the editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press) and the author of the critical monograph Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois University Press). Trigilio coedits the journal Court Green and is an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly. He lives in Chicago.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 140 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-337-9

$16

Ghosts of the Upper Floor b… by BlazeVOX [books]