American Rhapsody

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Carol Stone

The author’s romanticizing and grieving for her lost parents and America extends from the Prohibition era, its glamour and notoriety, with figures like Warren Harding and Josephine Baker to Enron, urban decay, and illegal immigration.

Carole Stone is Distinguished Professor of English, Emerita, at Montclair State University. She has published five books of poetry and four chapbooks, among them Traveling with the Dead (Backwaters Press), American Rhapsody (CavanKerry Press, 2012), and Limited Editions (CavanKerry Press, 2023). Her recent work has appeared in Blue Fifth Journal, Slab, Bellevue Literary Review, and Nimrod. Her book, No Happy Ruins, was one of five finalists in the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Contest. She has won three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a fellowship to the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, England. Carole Stone is Distinguished Professor of English, Emerita, at Montclair State University. She has published five books of poetry and four chapbooks, among them Traveling with the Dead (Backwaters Press), American Rhapsody (CavanKerry Press, 2012), and Limited Editions (CavanKerry Press, 2023). Her recent work has appeared in Blue Fifth Journal, Slab, Bellevue Literary Review, and Nimrod. Her book, No Happy Ruins, was one of five finalists in the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Contest. She has won three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a fellowship to the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, England.

Marathon Dancing

Ladies and gentlemen, how long can they last?

– master of ceremonies

We sleep on each others’ shoulders.
Feet and legs swollen,
shoes worn, we rest until
the whistle starts, marathon not over

yet. For 25 cents they watch
and we have our chance
to win hundreds of dollars.
To keep up the dance,

we shuffle, knit or I sometimes
write letters on a folding desk
around my neck. As long as
my feet don’t rest

but move up and down.
We gather nickels and dimes
from the hardwood floor, silver showers
that won’t make the time

go any faster. I can’t slap my partner awake.
What money we’d make
if we’d waltz or foxtrot! What it takes
to still hunger’s ache.

Le Jazz Hot
– for Josephine Baker

In Revue Nègre,
face painted, banana skirt
circling her swinging hips,
behind jiggling on cue.

On screen, bare breasts
covered with coral necklaces,
feathered hair, a bright parrot,
swinging on a vine.

In cafés, eyes rolling,
flashing teeth, mock smile,
dancing to le jazz hot
with white men.

Far from rioters
who lynched, stoned,
scorched East St. Louis,
sky black with ash,

where she hid in a basement.
Scared girl.
Mad to be herself.
One who got away.

Stone does not shy away from placing her heart on the page as a way of coming to terms with a history she recognizes she may never understand. It is through this honesty that Stone wins over her readers.
— ForeWord Review, Full review at www.forewordreviews.com

Carole Stone’s new book of poems, American Rhapsody is a charming, witty, musical portrayal of American life in the nineteen-twenties and thirties and of its larger impact on the nation today. Skillfully, and with equal felicity, she evokes the sublime of Le Jazz Hot and the seediness of rum-runners, marathon dancers and racketeers. Through it all she muses on the hope and destiny of the American dream, elegizing believers who “live / as language / in my inky heart.”
— Grace Schulman

Carole Stone recreates the experience of a previous American generation that an orphan remembers from her parents’ glamorous past. Wry clarity is her hallmark, humor her chisel for sculpting from loneliness both identity and art.
— Molly Peacock

Christopher Bursk confesses that until he was seventeen, he solaced himself by inventing an imaginary companion. The quiet triumph of this book is that he enlists the reader as such a secret sharer. In A Car Stops and a Door Opens, he takes us on a “road trip” that includes his troubled upbringing. On this journey, he explores relationships with honesty and empathy, while disarming us with his rueful, quirky wit: “No one else was willing to be Judas, so I agreed…” Bursk is America’s bard of adolescence.
— Philip Fried, editor Manhattan Review

March 2012
88 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-28-0

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