Book Reviews: Patricia Carragon reviews Carol Wierzbicki’s Top Teen Greatest Hits for GLR

 

Reprinted from Gently Read Literature, January 1, 2010

The Regrettable Passage: Patricia Carragon on Carol Wierzbicki’s Top Teen Greatest Hits

Carol Wierzbicki, Top Teen Greatest Hits, Poets Wear Prada Press


For me, adolescence was the regrettable passage from childhood to the demands of hormones and higher education. For Carol Wierzbicki, it became the Top Teen Greatest Hits, an intriguing collection of poems published by Poets Wear Prada Press (2009). Ms. Wierzbicki is tough and sensitive. She writes as if she were an observer during her rite of passage, even stepping back when she was five and six, taking in situations and translating growing pains into mini stories. Mundane occurrences, whether sad or funny, are refreshing to read, filled with insight and lessons.
For instance, in New Name (for Mom), the six-year-old Carol requested her mother to call her Lisa. Her mother said:

Would you like a glass of milk … Lisa?Are you going outside now … Lisa?

And Carol wrote:

Mom gives me time to chafe at the name
that has begun to rub spots on my psyche
raw. She doesn’t quit
until I tell her to abandon it.

Her mother was teaching her the value of being at peace with one’s name and self, which is not an easy lesson for either child or adult to absorb. Carol writes this without being sentimental or coy. Her words are simple and her metaphors work. You feel the harsh rubbing on her psyche’s sore spots—a lesson being learned.

Another example is the poem, "Dorothy’s Poem (for Dorothy Friedman). " Although this excellent piece was dedicated to Ms. Friedman, Carol makes you feel it’s universal. I can relate to this. We, in many ways, are little amputated people walking around and the past is not black-and-white nor sepia tone. But the train is our home—life moves to the next station and we learn to laugh or cry at the passing scenery, knowing that rules make no sense.

Carol Wierzbicki’s Top Teen Greatest Hits is a big hit. In each of her fourteen poems, Ms. Wierzbicki mastered the technique of storytelling through perception and simplicity—her rite of passage to be read and shared by all.




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Patricia Carragon is a New York City poet and writer. Her publications include Poetz.com, Rogue Scholars, Poets Wear Prada, Best Poem, Big City Lit, CLWN WR, Chantarelle’s Notebook, Clockwise Cat, Ditch Poetry Magazine, Mobius the Poetry Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, Marymark Press, and more. She is the author of Journey to the Center of My Mind (Rogue Scholars Press). She is a member of Brevitas, a group dedicated to short poems. Patricia hosts and curates the Brooklyn-based Brownstone Poets and is the editor of the annual anthology.

Boog City Hosts Poets Wear Prada at ACA Galleries, New York City in September

Boog City will host a reading featuring writers from Poets Wear Prada on Tuesday September 27th, 2011. David A. Kirschenbaum, editor of Boog City, will host the event on:

Tuesday, September 27, 2011, 6pm

@

ACA Galleries

529 W. 20th St., 5th Floor

New York City

Featuring:

Austin Alexis
Joel Allegretti
Jee Leong Koh
Richard Marx Weinraub
Dorinda Wegener
Karen Neuberg
Maria Lisella
Carol Wiezerbicki

Please come out and support the writers, Poets Wear Prada, and Boog City at the reading!

Check out Boog City online at http://welcometoboogcity.com/

Austin Alexis has published poetry and flash fiction most recently in First Literary Review--East, Nomad's Choir, Mobius: The Poetry Magazine, Rusty Typer, Dance Macabre, Come Hear (an anthology), Quill and Parchment and Vox Poetica. His second chapbook, For Lincoln & Other Poems (Poets Wear Prada), was named a Small Press Review "Pick of the Month" and contains a Pushcart Prize nominated poem. One of his short stories was performed at the 2010 Woodstock-Diamond Dance Festival.

Joel Allegretti (www.joelallegretti.com) is the author of two full-length volumes from The Poet’s Press: The Plague Psalms (2000) and Father Silicon, selected by The Kansas City Star as one of 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006, a list that included novels by Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon. In 2010 Poets Wear Prada released his third collection, Thrum, a chapbook of poems and poetic essays about musical instruments. Allegretti’s work has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Margie, Fulcrum, Voices in Italian Americana, and Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics and many other national journals, as well as on the Best American Poetry blog. Allegretti’s poems were the basis of two song cycles by Frank Ezra Levy, whose symphonic work is available in the American Classics series on Naxos.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of two books of poems, Payday Loans (Poets Wear Prada) and Equal to the Earth (Bench Press). His new book Seven Studies for a Self Portrait was released by the same press in March 2011. Born in Singapore, he lives in New York City, and blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter.

Related to the Marx Brothers through his mother, Richard Marx Weinraub was born in New York City in 1949; he was a Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico from 1987 through 2010. A book of his poetry entitled Wonder Bread Hill was published in 2002 by the University of Puerto Rico Press. His poetry has appeared in many journals including The Paris Review, Asheville Poetry Review, South Carolina Review, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, North American Review, Measure, The Evansville Review, Slate, and River Styx. A

Spanish translation of Wonder Bread Hill was recently published by Terranova Press. A chapbook of his poetry entitled Heavenly Bodies was published in 2008 by Poets Wear Prada Press, and a poem from it was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize.

Maria Lisella's Pushcart Poetry Prize-nominated work appears in Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). Her poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Skidrow Penthouse, Paterson Literary Review and New Verse News among others; her latest short story appears in Sweet Lemons 2, Writing with a Sicilian Accent (Legas Press). She co-curates the Italian American Writers Association monthly literary readings at Cornelia St. Cafe on the 2nd Saturday of each month. She is a travel writer by profession.

Karen Neuberg lives in Brooklyn, NY and West Hurley, NY. Her

poems have appeared in numerous publications including Big City Lit, decomP, elimae, NewVerseNews, Pirene’s Fountain, Stone Telling, and the anthology Child of My Child. She’s a two-time Pushcart and a Best of the Net nominee, holds an MFA from the New School, and is associate editor of Inertia Magazine and of First Literary Review, East. Her chapbook, Detailed Still was published by Poets Wear Prada Press and is available from Amazon. For more information and links to her on-line work, please see her website at http://karenneuberg.blogspot.com/

Carol Wierzbicki is a published poet, editor and reviewer. She has run poetry readings in New York City, and is co-editor of the Unbearables Worst Book and Sex anthologies. Her latest chapbook is Top Teen Greatest Hits, poems about teen angst (Poets Wear Prada, 2009). Her short story, “Mending,” will appear in the summer 2011 issue of Many Mountains Moving.

Dorinda Wegener holds a MFA from New England College where she was a Joel Oppenheimer Award recipient. Her poems have been published in The Antioch Review, Indiana Review, Hotel Amerika, and Mid-American Review, among many others. Dorinda has had the honor of reading with the louderARTS Project in New York City. Her poems, “The Harvest” and “Evening Service,” were both finalist for the Marlboro Prize as judged by poet Edward Hirsch. She currently resides with her husband and daughter in Staten Island, New York, where she’s a teaching artist of poetry for Teachers & Writers Collaborative. In 2011, she will present a reading and discourse on William Carlos Willams at the Williams Center for the Arts, Rutherford, New Jersey, as well as join the editorial staff of Green Mountains Review as a reader.

Boog City is a small press now its 16th year, and East Village community newspaper of the same name. The press has published more than three dozen volumes of poetry and various zines, featuring work by Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, Eileen Myles, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Bernadette Mayer among many others, and theme issues on topics ranging from baseball to women's writing, Louisville, Ky. to The Ramones and Talking Heads making the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

Carol Wierzbicki | Top Teen Greatest Hits

Wierzbicki's poems are like early Corso, before the Beats, when he got straight to the point quickly, with great beauty. Her words carry the necessary freight with terrific speed and economy--look how spare and yet terribly lovely "Dorothy's Poem" is--it breaks your heart with absolute efficiency. If poetry is to proceed into the future with any sort of relevancy, this is one way it might do so.

—RON KOLM, co-author of Neo Phobe (with Jim Feast)

Carol Wierzbicki’s TOP TEEN GREATEST HITS is a big hit. In each of her fourteen poems, Ms. Wierzbicki mastered the technique of storytelling through perception and simplicity—her rite of passage to be read and shared by all.

—PATRICA CARRAGON, author of Journey to the Center of My Mind, and host of the Brownstone Poets Reading Series

To read the rest of Ms. Carragon's review in the January 2010 edition of GENTLY READ LITERATURE please follow the link to:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/the-regrettable-passage-patricia-carragon-on-carol-wierzbickis-top-teen-greatest-hits/


TOP TEEN GREATEST HITS
Poems by Carol Wierzbicki
ISBN 978-0-9817678-7-1
soft cover/saddle stitch/15 pp.
$8.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)

Photo Credit: Pieter van Hattem

Carol Wierzbicki has run poetry reading series at ABC No Rio and elsewhere in New York City. Her work has been published in Long Shot, The Cafe Review, Public Illumination, and Evergreen Review, and in the Unbearables anthologies Unbearables (1995), Crimes of the Beats (1998), and Help Yourself! (2002), published by Autonomedia. She also is an editor of the Unbearables anthology, The Worst Book I Ever Read (Autonomedia). She compiled and edited Stories from the Infirmary (Universal Publishers,1999), an anthology of fiction and poetry on chronic illness. Her book reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and American Book Review.

Preview this book on Issuu!