The Consolation of Geometry
by Alice Campbell Romano
Available Now: The Consolation of Geometry is available now!
C&R Press Summer Tide Pool 2023 Chapbook Selection
ABOUT
The story in poems reads like a movie and exposes the bitter compromises a couple will make with abuse and love. Lyrical, accomplished poems examine and ultimately reveal “why we stay” as the poet recovers herself and her love through the language of healing. Courageous, honest, sometimes funny, the poet writes the book her friends said she’d have to wait to publish until her husband died, but he read the poems and, as proof of the couple’s bond, told her to go ahead and send it out, “It’s good and it’s your life. You deserve to be heard.”
PRAISE FOR The Consolation of Geometry
“Virginia Woolf writes, “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” Alice Campbell Romano’s speaker tells the truth, hard truths, about herself and about everyone in her orbit. The Consolation of Geometry is the brilliant debut of a skilled poet with a strong, distinctive voice. These poems are intelligent and wise. They are linguistically impressive and they will break your heart. They traverse emotional and geographical landscapes— Italy, LA, and New York—over the span of decades. This speaker is nobody’s fool. As elegant and tough as Lauren Bacall, this speaker has seen her share of trouble in her life and she always lands on her feet. The poems are full of wit, heartbreak, joy, illness, beauty, family, and above all—loyalty. Loyalty to her husband but also to herself. Campbell Romano is the narrator of her own story and in these poems, we grasp what Woolf knew—we are our own consolation. In the title poem, she writes, “Even now, I can be cornered in a sharp/angle by the person who/lives with me…/The metal will vibrate with a deep/ thrum and the deep thrum/ will pulse through me and the broken bits of me/will coalesce in the fullness of the sound, and I will become/ whole…”
Jennifer Franklin, author of If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023)
About the Author
Alice Campbell Romano
The Consolation of Geomtery is a Summer Tide Pool 2023 Chapbook Selection. A poem is the face of what we’ve lived. Everything is soaked in all that came before. Alice Campbell Romano lived 13 years in Rome, Italy, turning Italian sceneggiature into American movie scripts. She married a dashing Italian; they raised their family in Rome and in Los Angeles where Alice became President of The Independent Writers of Southern California (IWOSC) and worked with independent film and TV producers as well as for Universal Studios. Alice is a published and anthologized poet. She is an active member of The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center in the Hudson Highlands where she grew up amid tall oaks that make an appearance in The Consolation of Geometry, her first book.
