Gail Wronsky – författare

"Any other poet with Gail Wronsky’s gift for sheer gorgeousness—for the sensuous image, for shapeliness, for the ever-unfolding ever-mobile vocal line—would call it a day. But Wronsky’s intellect is of a larger order: restless, irreverent, wittily attuned to the force-fields of cultural fashion and to the depths those fashions bespeak. How heartening to see trenchant critique and passionate endorsement so fully intertwined! Poems for Infidels is a celebrant’s book, “guilty . . . of beauty” and, resoundingly, of faith."—Linda Gregerson

A collaboration by a legendary artist and a writer hailed by David St. John as “a poet of lasting beauty and relentless invention”Gronk was raised in East Los Angeles and lives in downtown LA. Gail Wronsky was raised in suburban Detroit and lives in the hippie haven of Topanga Canyon. But as artists they have found common ground—a shared commitment to the offbeat and the beautiful, to the slightly absurd and the slyly surreal, to blurring the distinction between our inner lives of dreams and imagination and our daily realities. Wronsky’s poems and Gronk’s drawings are equally grounded in poetic imagery. Wronsky mixes vernacular diction, or spoken language, with a more formal style in a way that is entirely unique; Gronk’s signature style alludes to both street art and classical art. Both are committed to making memorable work that surprises and delights, that sharpens and feeds our everyday lives as well as our deepest selves.

This book collects over four decades of work by this unique and imaginative poet. Wronsky's poems, informed by her reading of classical texts as well as contemporary poetics, explore feminism, environmentalism, and mortality in language that is both multi-layered and musical. At times dark and at times humorous, her poems speak to our strengths as well as our frailties.

Free verse poems that merge surrealism with absurdism in their discussion of the complexities of the heart and the meanings in the creases of our souls, opening verbal doorways into what is absolute.Mockingbird’s Proverbs is divided into three sections.  The first section, “Mockingbird’s Proverbs,” contains “proverbs” poems, modeled on William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  They are short poems that contain statements of prediction, and plumb and interrogate forms and statements of inherited wisdom.  The second section, “A Portion of Shadow,” holds poems that contain always the awareness of death and darkness.  Some are lively, energetic, imagistic poems that this awareness adds a layer of shadow to.  The third, “Struggling, in Spite of Everything, to Survive,” contains poems about surviving in this world in the face of death.  “The moon is in labor” refers to the erosion of abortion rights.  “Something is dancing in the corner of my eye” is a poem addressed to my daughter, about surviving.  The last line in the book, “it (the poem) could save us if it wanted to” leaves open-ended the question of whether or not poetry really can save us.  I hope that it can.