Croak is a frog-and-girl opera in three parts, played out like a YouTube mashup of mid-century cartoons set to a contemporary pop song. It parades, mutilates, and reacquaints Kermit the Frog with Girl 00010111, Michigan J with Aristophanes, and biblical plagues with caged canaries in a vaudevillian play of time, culture, gender, and narrative. Combining vivisection and classical literature, empirical observation and philosophical speculation, Jenny Sampririsi's grotesque characters splash and sparkle before moving toward their inevitable narrative end. 'As invigorating and idiosyncratic a collection as this reviewer has encountered in some time. A must-read.' -- Seth Abramson, Huffington Post
Jenny Sampirisi is the Managing Editor of BookThug and co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing. She is the author of the novel is/was (Insomniac 2008). Croak is her first book of poetry. She lives in Toronto.
Title: Croak
Author: Sampirisi, Jenny
ISBN: 9781552452509
Binding:
Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication Date: 2012-03-15
Number of Pages: 104
Weight: 0.1588 kg
'As invigorating and idiosyncratic a collection as this reviewer has encountered in some time. A must-read.' -- Seth Abramson, Huffington Post 'I haven't read a book of poetry as tonally sly (strange), and as formally surprising -- in that it never levels off into a settled shape, though the voicing is always grounded in ongoing immediacy -- as Jenny Sampirisi's Croak in a long time. The world this writing performs takes deformation as a kind of functional and nonetheless staged condition its characters give off and exploit, emotional intelligence streaming beneath the action with a perfectly measured balance of humour and consequence.' -- Anselm Berrigan, author of Free Cell and Notes From Irrelevance