Meteor
by C.M. Mayo
Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award
Gival Press, 2019
“Meteor pierces the psyche with a dazzling presence and otherworldly light. Mayo delights in the pleasures of language and the possibilities of imagination. By leveling a playfully skeptical voice that is wholly her own, she transforms the quotidian into the outlandish while making the bizarre seem familiar and inviting. Through her inexorable wit and endless inventiveness, Mayo crafts the most unusual work—a book that is both challenging and fun to read.”
—Linwood D. Rumney, Author of Abandoned Earth
“The first thing we notice while reading C.M. Mayo is her motion, her flow, silk—line after line summoning us through story. This gift can’t be manufactured. It comes from a writer, seasoned and smart, with something to say and the literary confidence to say it. I believe this is Mayo’s best work—perfect words without artifice; characters and situations made permanent; a triumph of language as a natural art. She brings flowers to the living.”
—Grace Cavalieri, The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress
WHERE TO FIND THIS BOOK
amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound / Politics and Prose / Book Depository
READ SOME POEMS FROM THIS BOOK
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SELECTED INTERVIEWS WITH + ARTICLES BY C.M. MAYO ABOUT THIS BOOK
Interview: Leslie Pietrzyk’s Work-in-Progress Blog, January 21, 2019
Noodling: Meteor, Influences, Ambiance, Madam Mayo blog, December 3, 2018
“C.M. Mayo creates magic, in poems that transform the ordinary into something more marvelous and strange. Whether describing a haircut by the wife of ‘the man who mows the lawn around the nuclear warheads,’ or feuding with the neighborhood squirrels over ownership rights to nuts, or commenting on the commercialization of services in the long poem ‘I Will,’ Mayo transforms the quotidian into something magnificent, until—as she says in the title poem—‘No one would believe me/No one would believe any of this.’ Meteor is a delight and an astonishment.”
— Kim Roberts
“Whether describing a nuclear childhood of military bases with UFOs, the assasination of a hippopotamus or chaos in the ‘hood, these poems of memory and imagination bring to life the back stories of our delirious times. To be savored.”
— Bruce Berger
“Funny and thoughtful, Meteor collects effective narrative poems”
— Foreword Magazine