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The Silence of Doorways
by Sharon Venezio
88 pages/43 poems
Editors: Ricki Mandeville, Michael Miller
Publisher: Moon Tide Press (March 1, 2013)
ISBN-10: 0983965153
ISBN-13: 978-0983965152
Price: $17.00
To Order: http://www.moontidepress.com/category/our-books/

About the Book:

The first collection of poetry by Sharon Venezio, with a foreword by Dorothy Barresi.


Advance Praise:

Sharon Venezio's terrific first collection of poems, The Silence of Doorways, reminds us that the best
new poetry - the kind we delight in reading - is nimble in its negotiations between assurance and surprise,
wit and discovery, sense and transcendence. - Dorothy Barresi

What appeals to me most about these surpassingly lovely poems is the way they combine a trance-like
calm with a sense of unease, and a luminous clarity with a feeling of deep abiding mystery. And when
she's really on her game, Sharon Venezio - one of the best darn lyric poets to have wandered into L.A.
in many a year - can make the ephemeral seem tangible and the mundane transcendent. Few could draw
forth such elevated notes as these from a five-hundred dollar '76 Chevy Nova: "It was more beautiful/
than salt air,/ ocean, wing.// It was passage,/ shift, spark.// The bone-dry/ squeaky waste land/
life began." - Suzanne Lummis

In this impressive debut collection, Sharon Venezio photographs the stopped fragments of memory in order
to restore the self to a dynamic flux of lived experience -"the wild dishevelment of being, that fierce blue
drowning" - a kaleidoscopic portrait that refutes the socially mediated subject position and the hunted
vulnerability fixed by a male scope. In a daring act of rescue and art making, Venezio seeks the frameless
frame, one that comprehends without limiting, shelters without walling in the silence. - Chad Sweeney


About the Author:

Sharon Venezio received an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her poems have
appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Chaparral, Midway Journal, Reed, Transfer, Two Hawks Quarterly
and elsewhere. She is co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets and works as a behavior analyst in
Los Angeles. The Silence of Doorways is her first full-length collection. To learn more about her,
visit sharonvenezio.com


From the Book:


The Flame
by Sharon Venezio

Night's wingspan, wide as moon,
stretches toward the horizon.
Your ghost is an unkindness

of ravens contained like a photograph
moody with shadow. Your ghost
is an ancient tree

with nests of hair that flame
white hibiscus, the flowers still bloom
the garden with light.

Each fall I eat the flowered flame
to forget you, petal by petal,
eat it down to its grief

o doomed lover
hold your face up to the sky
until it becomes the sky.
 

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