Description
Book SynopsisCroak 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
Trade Review'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
