{"id":1350,"date":"2017-05-25T22:17:04","date_gmt":"2017-05-25T22:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/?post_type=product&#038;p=1350"},"modified":"2024-01-12T06:04:43","modified_gmt":"2024-01-12T06:04:43","slug":"blight-blight-blight-ray-of-hope","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/product\/blight-blight-blight-ray-of-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"<em>Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope<\/em>, Frank Montesonti"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Barrow Street 2011 Prize Winner<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Frank Montesonti\u2019s wit reminds me of the Depression, when all the great novelists wrote dialogue for movies. He can be as glib as the blonde bomb-shell in a 1930s suspense film or as deadpan as the morose sidekick. Not only will he help dump the body, he\u2019ll add the necessary wry comment. \u2018It was a very good year *long pause+ for the wine.\u2019 Or, better still, \u2018I need to tell you something before it\u2019s too late:\/It\u2019s too late.\u2019 When the speaker in one poem is asked what a poem should be like, all of his examples include piranhas. In-deed, the dangers of the world are presented as an integral part of a grand comedy. \u2018You see, I\u2019m after what\u2019s behind the low-budget scene,\u2019 he writes in \u2018Film Noir.\u2019 And, despite all the tricks and effects and zingers, that ingenious mind at work is also revealing the clown\u2019s sadness. That, too, is part of the show. The part where he is one of us.<br \/>\n\u2014D.A. Powell<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Frank Montesonti is the author of the chapbook <em>A Civic Pageant<\/em> (Black Lawrence Press, 2009). He has been published in literary journals such as <em>Tin House<\/em>, <em>Black Warrior Review<\/em>, <em>AQR<\/em>, <em>Poet Lore<\/em>, and <em>Poems and Plays<\/em>, among many others. <em>Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope<\/em> is his first full-length collection. His second collection,<em>Hope Tree<\/em>, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2014. He has an MFA from the University of Arizona and teaches poetry at National University. A longtime resident of Indiana, he now lives in Los Angeles, California.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Applicable bookseller\/retail discount on bulk orders of 10+ copies automatically applied at checkout.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1351,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[20],"product_tag":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1350","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-poetry","8":"first","9":"instock","10":"shipping-taxable","11":"purchasable","12":"product-type-simple"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/1350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_brand","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_brand?post=1350"},{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=1350"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=1350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}