a collection of 59 poems by Gary Percesepe

a collection of 26 pieces of flash fiction

Winter is a season of the heart. The Winter of J is a collection of poems set in Buffalo, New York, where Gary Percesepe spent twelve years--one winter falling in and out of love with J, and taking an axe to the frozen sea inside. though we parted that spring the roads kept freezing and thawing between snows until the weak sun wakened me and I realized our love had made me thinner. From First Date and new love: She was hair and bruises with a shot of ragamuffin my thoughts slowed to the pace of drifting snow to blizzards and frozen rivers blued from bridge lights, we come inevitably to Breakup-- she will appear like a cutting stone her laughter a fresh sword Finding resolution at last in acceptance, but not without lingering questions: can memory freeze in place like this? The Winter of J is a lyrical meditation on love and temporality. With the poet, we wonder how such a short span of time can have such a lasting impact, while marveling again at the resiliency of the human heart: the poet amounted his affair summed it at five months licked his ice cream cone and melted We know these women only from their leavings. We love to watch them go.

Gary Percesepe's LIGHT TURNOUT is a romp through a world we mostly recognize, made brilliant and startling through language well-chosen. From erasing the neighbors to visits by dead sisters and angels in the night, the poems create a belief system we want to embrace and cause the reader to applaud a spirited writer reworking the universe for our delight. In these grim times, LIGHT TURNOUT reminds us that the root word of "amuse" is "muse"-and here we have a perfect muse and host, creating a presence we are glad to step into. "Whatever happens today, we are here,"-glad to participate in these giddy, life-affirming acts of invention." -Maxine Chernoff Each piece in Gary Percesepe's Light Turnout is its own world-some surreal, some crass, some beautiful. Despite the brevity of these pieces, or perhaps because of it, this collection is vast. Cable bridges "sing in the wind like giant harps," "tangled trees look like seaweed in the twilight," yet in others, the characters are "survivors of a dead mother and no-account father." This collection has scope. I loved each small world I inhabited while reading it. -Shaindel Beers Gary Percesepe's latest collection of poetry, brilliantly captures the existential mood of the times. Somewhere moonflowers shimmer in street dust, a long-lost father works late at night alone in a parallel world, and we may wake up one day and find ourselves covered in covfefe, searching for the last fallen ice cube in the fridge. -Morgan Harlowe Percesepe's voice is one of shrewdness, marked by a rare combination of emotional astuteness and a penetrating depth of vision." -Nicolette Wong

Gary Percesepe’s new poetry collection The Girl of My Dream takes its title from the opening pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: “Little by little the memory of her would fade, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.” Like a bite of the fabled Proustian madeleine, the reader is drawn into reverie, a dreamscape of places, names, scents, and laments for lost time, both its illusions and rewards. The book is anchored by an off-kilter story of an encounter between a film student and a cop in rural Illinois at the scene of a wreck. Tipped is an unlikely and at times hilarious clash of perspectives which nevertheless merge into the same lane with two sleeves of art and an unexpected visit by Italian film star Sophia Loren. At the heart of the book is a floating reverie of sadness and grief remembered that takes us from Trieste to New York City painted gray on gray in the temporal space of November—years of November. Readers explore literary “tips of the hat” to writers as different as Proust, Kerouac, and Cheever, prose poems alongside villanelles and haiku in search of the forgotten girl of the dream. “Poems simultaneously street-smart and softly lyrical, they sing the hard-edges of love’s brief rapture… Percesepe announces himself as our twentieth century O’Hara ~ Kara Candito, author of Taste of Cherry and Spectator

Gary Percesepe's new poetry collection The Girl of My Dream takes its title from the opening pages of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time: "Little by little the memory of her would fade, I had forgotten the girl of my dream." Like a bite of the fabled Proustian madeleine, the reader is drawn into reverie, a dreamscape of places, names, scents, and laments for lost time, both its illusions and rewards. The book is anchored by an off-kilter story of an encounter between a film student and a cop in rural Illinois at the scene of a wreck. Tipped is an unlikely and at times hilarious clash of perspectives which nevertheless merge into the same lane with two sleeves of art and an unexpected visit by Italian film star Sophia Loren. At the heart of the book is a floating reverie of sadness and grief remembered that takes us from Trieste to New York City painted gray on gray in the temporal space of November-years of November. Readers explore literary "tips of the hat" to writers as different as Proust, Kerouac, and Cheever, prose poems alongside villanelles and haiku in search of the forgotten girl of the dream. "Poems simultaneously street-smart and softly lyrical, they sing the hard-edges of love's brief rapture... Percesepe announces himself as our twentieth century O'Hara Kara Candito, author of Taste of Cherry and Spectator

"Powerful, deeply engaging stories that live in their history as if the past were the present. Percesepe has the gift of recreating time and place in the way of Philip Roth and Roddy Doyle, replete with telling detail and characters we can all recognize." T.C. Boyle "However he did it, these stories are simultaneously crisp and gentle, and, repeatedly, Gary Percesepe seems to have found the right viewing distance. The language and sentence cadences sometimes nod to Hemingway, by way of Carver. The stepping stones thrown down are literary, with a nod to (among others) Irwin Shaw, as well as to Patrick Modiano. These stories are surprisingly, refreshingly direct, involving, and very convincing. Really wonderful." Ann Beattie "Gary Percesepe's new collection is a jewel, a marvel, a remarkable find. These stories are tasty, tight, bitter, angry, deeply sad, occasionally relieved, and always about both teaching and learning. Moratorium is a gritty performative work that shakes the bones inside the closets where we hide all of our skeletons." Frederick Barthelme --- From one of America's acclaimed poet-philosophers comes a stunning short story collection that holds delayed afterimages of people navigating love, loss, desire, and sex. Gary Percesepe's new book, MORATORIUM, is a gallery of intimate portraits of people who long for human connection without quite trusting it. In the title story, a war hero lashes his daughter to the banister in the lead-up to a massive anti-Vietnam war protest. A high school boy gives up on love but never Gatsby; another recalls a summer in the Adirondacks when he spurned a classmate whose family later met with tragedy. Beautiful women select men for amusement; parents grieve children they don't quite get; men dispatch women in order to inventory their loss. In these delicately crafted stories, a drunk speeder bonds with a cop over Uma Thurman's feet; a grocery clerk engages in revenge sex with someone's shattered, self-absorbed husband. These stories are melancholy and wild; they are funny and hopeful, too. Here are people whose lives seem delayed momentarily between mounting losses-stories that reveal the way we live now. Reading this story collection, we see our world again as if for the first time.

What May Have Been is a novel in letters exchanged between the artist Jackson Pollock and his fictional lover, a young woman called Dori G. Susan Tepper and Gary Percesepe have created a sexy and luminous love story that takes place sometime during the late 1940's, in that sandy wonderland at the eastern tip of Long Island known as The Hamptons. Advance Praise for What May Have Been "In this extraordinary novel, Pollock tells his lover that things like paint and wives are very small in the scheme of things. Gary Percesepe and Susan Tepper show how the great scheme of things is, in fact, in literary art, captured in paint and wives and a Montauk surf and a silky scarf and narrow hips and a cold water flat and a used Ford. Brilliantly conceived, brilliantly executed, this is a stunning book about art and about life." -Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain "The fictional letters between Pollock and an imaginary Dori G come out in a hailstorm of paint flecks, lockets, long looks, kisses, blowing sand. Dori sees Jackson in his distance and his nearing, and his return to her like the visit of one of the Greek gods to his mortal lover, as piercing and as fatal." -Mary Grimm, author of Left to Themselves and Stealing Time "How to convey the irresistible pleasures of this novel in letters? The language mimics the slashing, dramatic immediate heroic gestures of abstract expressionism, is an extraordinary act of poetic invention, and tells a sexy and doomed love story." -James Robison, author of The Illustrator and Rumors "These two fervent voices exude the splendor and gloom of adulterous love." -Mark Wisniewski, author of Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman