Response Week 1

Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s recent poetry collection, entitled The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, presents thirteen post-Modern, or anti-Romantic, poems. These pieces reject a sense of an untamable, untainted maternal Nature as a source of human purification and revitalization, and support the post-Modern conception of a tarnished and human-conquered Nature. Calvocoressi’s collection centers on decaying towns, failed and ever-present technology, and the subsequent struggle and oppression of the people. She presents her rendition of human-inflicted disasters from varying and multiple perspectives in several of the poems, including “From the Adult Drive-In.” This piece however, in contrast to the many other multiple-perspective pieces in the collection, depicts a decaying town as many of the citizens view an overarching adult film on the hillside from the perspective of various townspeople and the film characters. This poem is the sole multiple-perspective piece that details a seemingly current, unknown event with anonymous characters. Furthermore, the piece follows a different format than its counterparts: rather than the nine sub-sections succinctly following one another, they scatter throughout the collection. The language and format allow readers to both view and participate in the poem, which becomes increasing violent. However, the altering structure allows the readers to experience horror and disgust, yet swiftly abandon concern at the next poem. Calvocoressi, however, recursively slams the material into readers’ faces and forces them to remember current horrors as equally as the past events she details.