OCTOBER 2009
This book of memoirs and poems is available from all booksellers:
Bordighera Press
John D. Calandra
Italian-American Institute
Dr. Anthony Julian
Tamburri, Dean
Queens College/CUNY
25 West 43rd
Street, 17th Floor
New York NY 10036
VIA Folios 57
ISBN
978-1-59954-006-1
LOC Control No.
2009905032
Trade paperback, 196
pp., $12.00
From the cover:
Lewis Putnam Turco is the author of some fifty volumes in the genres of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction including books, chapbooks and monographs. The most recent of these include The Museum of Ordinary People and Other Stories, published in 2008, and in 2009 Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697, a history of the period when science began to displace religion in the western world and of the settlement of Colonial America where his mother’s family, the Putnams, were deeply involved, on both sides of the issue, in the great Salem witchcraft craze of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692.
It is as a poet, however, that Lewis Turco has primarily been known. His First Poems appeared in 1960 as a selection of the Book Club for Poetry. The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004 — the latter sobriquet being an anagram pseudonym under which Lewis Turco has published most of his traditionally formal poems — appeared in 2004. Three years later, in 2007, Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, a gathering of his non-traditionally written poems, was published.
Founder of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1962 and of the creative writing program at the State University of New York College at Oswego in 1968, Turco’s first book of criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, won the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1986, and his A Book of Fears: Poems, with Italian translations by Joseph Alessia, won the first annual Bordighera Bi-Lingual Poetry Prize in 1998. In 1999 he received the John Ciardi Award for lifetime achievement in poetry sponsored by the periodical Italian Americana and the National Italian American Foundation.
Author of “the poet’s bible,” The Book of Forms: A Handbook of
Poetics, a seminal
work — currently in
its third edition —
in the development of the Neo-Formalist movement in the U. S., in 2008 Lewis
Turco received the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award given by the West Chester
University Poetry Conference. In 2000 he received an honorary degree from
Ashland University in Ohio, and this year he received a second honorary
doctorate of humane letters from the University of Maine at Fort Kent.
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