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Every week, The Thread checks in with booksellers around the country about their favorite books of the moment. This week, we spoke with Emmet Penney, of 

Emmet Penney is a longtime fan of poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi, who he once had the opportunity to take a class from: "She absolutely changed my life."

Calvocoressi's new collection, "Rocket Fantastic," is his current reading recommendation. 

The collection, Penney said, "has a lot of different characters in it. There's a loose family structure: the dowager aunt, an estranged brother who seems to be possibly stationed in Vietnam or at least overseas during wartime, the hermit, the major general, and there's this romantic other character named the bandleader."

"As I heard another poet describe it: 'There's never any air in her collections,'" Penney said. "There's no wasted space." 

"One of its big explorations is that life is locked in an interlude of longing, of waiting for things to happen, of desiring that they happen to you and sometimes being terrified of what might come your way." 

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Ask a bookseller

Tracy Mumford

Author

Emmet Penney recommends a poetry collection that explores how life is "waiting for things to happen ... and sometimes being terrified of what might come your way."

Emmet Penney recommends a poetry collection that explores how "life is locked in an interlude of longing, of waiting for things to happen ... and sometimes being terrified of what might come your way."

Ask a bookseller: Collected Works in Santa Fe, N.M.

'Rocket Fantastic' by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Where 'life is locked in an interlude of longing'

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