Julie Suk Award for Poetry finalist
15 Bytes (magazine) Book Award (poetry) finalist
New England Poetry Club's Sheila Margaret Motton Prize finalist
Rain intermits, bus windows steam up, loved ones suffer from dementia—in the constantly shifting, metaphoric world of Tremulous Hinge, figures struggle to remain standing and speaking against forces of gravity, time, and language. In these visually porous poems, boundaries waver and reconfigure along the rumbling shoreline of Rockaway or during the intermediary hours that an insomniac undergoes between darkness and dawn. Through a series of self-portraits, elegies, and Eros-tinged meditations, this hovering never subsides but offers, among the fragments, momentary constellations: “moths all swarming the / same light bulb.”
From the difficulties of stuttering to teetering attempts at love, from struggling to order a hamburger to tracing the deckled edge of a hydrangea, these poems tumble and hum, revealing a hinge between word and world. Ultimately, among lofting waves, collapsing hands, and darkening skies, words themselves—a stutterer's maneuvers through speech, a deceased grandfather’s use of punctuation—become forms of consolation. From its initial turbulence to its final surprising solace, this debut collection mesmerizes.
“Giannelli’s debut is a quiet affair, but its simplicity masks layers and a longing for precision exhibited through minute adjustments, tweaked phrases, and shifting imagery. This striving for fluency could have been born from the childhood speech impediment the poet reflects on poignantly in the opening poem: “since I can’t say everlasting/ I say every/ lost thing.” At the same time, Giannelli is preoccupied with double meanings. In “Star Gazers,” “we” look out at the stars, but they are looking right back at us. Metaphors are applied and swapped out, as in “Hydrangea,” where the flower is a snow cone, a “Bearded lady,// balloon man, chameleon,” “honeycomb/ and bouquet,” “viscous muscle,” and more. He contends with the limits of clarity using some quite brilliant anagrams and homonyms, as in “parents in the train window winnowed to transparence.” Sometimes Giannelli seems to pull stunning phrases whole from the ether, describing the tides as “the ocean tearing blue page after/ blue page from its journal.” He also explores grief through a document written by a deceased grandfather, its perplexities perhaps easier to contend with than those of life itself. Though perfect expression may be unattainable, poetry is often about the process, and it is a pleasure to watch Giannelli work (and rework) his magic.”—starred review, Publishers Weekly
“This extraordinary and sobering debut begins with a literal stutter—‘Since I couldn't say tomorrow / I said Wednesday.’ In trade for this impediment, Adam Giannelli finds that, in poetry, what can’t be said gives way to what must be said.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize
“Adam Giannelli talks to the world—to rain, to insomnia, to the beloveds here and vanished, to the stars themselves in their ‘old staring contest.’ Sink into this book as into solace and trouble. ‘Am I lost / or have I been lifted?’ the poet asks. Answer: happily for us, both.”—Marianne Boruch, author, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing
“Rilke meets Roethke in the beveled moptops of a hydrangea, a basketball net’s ‘punctured sieve,’ a rogue porcupine (‘quilled, in dark makeup, like the bass player / in an 80s band’), all transformed, in Giannelli’s scrupulous, sonically lavish articulation, into emblems of the unspeakable mystery inside every syllable. Inside us.”—Lisa Russ Spaar, author, Orexia: Poems
“In this stunning debut collection, the observations of an often-solitary speaker explode in dazzling metaphors, unexpected juxtapositions, and challenging insights. Elegy becomes explicit as the book progresses, met in the final sections by poems of relationship. But the note of loss remains: ‘What we’ve lost swims / under the surface of mirrors’—and in these extraordinary poems.”—Martha Collins, author, Admit One: An American Scrapbook
“Stutter”
since I couldn’t say tomorrow
I said Wednesday
since I couldn’t say Cleveland I said
Ohio
since I couldn’t say hello
I hung up
since I couldn’t say burger
a waitress finished
my sentence
a green-striped mint
dissolved
on my tongue
from peacock to dove
2016 Iowa Poetry Prize
2017 Julie Suk Award, Finalist
2018 Finalist for Utah's 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry
2018 Finalist for the New England Poetry Club's Sheila Margaret Motton Prize
