NARCISSUS

$19.95

by Cecilia Woloch

Prose poems alternate with brief lyrics to describe a narrative arc of failed and renewed romantic love—a turning inward, turning outward again, and no turning back, even in the face of loss.

Like the narcissus flower—delicate petals that bloom from a poisonous bulb, a flower named for the Greek myth of the youth who falls in love with his own reflection—the poems offer a sense of both beauty and danger. The danger of love and of love’s beautiful illusions, and the beauty that’s revealed after those illusions have been stripped away and what remains is the shimmer beneath the shimmering reflection, some deeper shine. Here, the meadows bare themselves to the moon, the new beloved steps out of the shadows, one enters “into a new love as into a mirror,” and the mirror turns to rain.

by Cecilia Woloch

Prose poems alternate with brief lyrics to describe a narrative arc of failed and renewed romantic love—a turning inward, turning outward again, and no turning back, even in the face of loss.

Like the narcissus flower—delicate petals that bloom from a poisonous bulb, a flower named for the Greek myth of the youth who falls in love with his own reflection—the poems offer a sense of both beauty and danger. The danger of love and of love’s beautiful illusions, and the beauty that’s revealed after those illusions have been stripped away and what remains is the shimmer beneath the shimmering reflection, some deeper shine. Here, the meadows bare themselves to the moon, the new beloved steps out of the shadows, one enters “into a new love as into a mirror,” and the mirror turns to rain.

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About the Author

Cecilia Woloch is a poet, writer, teacher, and traveler based in Los Angeles but “on the road” across the US and Europe six months each year. She has published essays, reviews, fiction and six award-winning collections of poems—most recently Earth (Two Sylvias Press, 2015) and Carpathia (BOA Editions, 2009), in addition to NARCISSUS (Tupelo, 2008). Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, Chateau de La Napoule Retreat for Artists, CEC/ArtsLink International and the Center for International Theatre Development. Maxine Kumin said of Cecilia Woloch’s work: “To write movingly about love in an era infused with hate requires a special gift: nostalgia hard-edged with realism. She has that gift.”

Advanced Praise:

“A searching not so much for the why of love as for the how—how we can love given what we know, what we’ve already lost.” —Carine Topal, poet

In a review in the Winter 2010 issue of Agni Online, Kate Northrup has observed, “In Narcissus, Cecilia Woloch has fashioned a gorgeous, rigid world. It is silvery, of course, and glittering. It is full, especially at first, of shifts and fractures resulting from the limits of the speaker’s fixed positions.” Read the full review.

Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-54-5