City of Stories (Červená Barva Press, 2021)
Denise Provost served for many years in local government and for almost fifteen years in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. She has published in such journals as Ibbetson Street, Muddy River Poetry Review, qarrtsiluni, Quadrille, Poetry Porch’s Sonnet Scroll, Sanctuary, Light Quarterly, and in numerous Bagel Bard anthologies. She received the New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen Award in 2021, and the Best Love Sonnet Award from the Maria C. Faust Sonnet Competition in 2012. Her chapbook Curious Peach was published by Ibbetson Street Press in 2019.
“City of Stories is a full length poetry collection which explores the narratives we construct to shape our world. In three thematic sections, these poems observe the shared experiences of community, reactions to current events, and the imaginative life sparked by interactions with literature. Many of these poems employ formal conventions: Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets; quatrains, heroic couplets, the ghazal and the ballade.”
“Both the art and toil of poetry might be summed up as the love of words. In “City of Stories” Denise Provost proves over and over that her romance is fruitful and enduring. The book opens with a series of charming sketches which limn the aura of her hometown city. From there, the “city” metaphor expands, and the reader is guided through realms that are personal, political, historical, literary, mythical, and even all of the above. Among its many surprises, Walt Whitman will declaim his apotheosis of the Internet, Rumi will have his own blog on it, and Maud Gonne will rewrite a famous poem by Yeats. This volume sparkles with bright spirit.”
-Tomas O’Leary, author of In the Wellspring of the Ear
“Tip O’Neill’s famous aphorism can be rightly extended: good poetry, like good politics, is local. Denise Provost’s City of Stories sings the neighborhoods, the everyday events, the Honk! festival, Somerville’s ArtBeat, Kendall Square, Longfellow Bridge – but reveals these places and events as universal. These poems portray carefully observed daily life around us – people talking on their phones, waiting for buses, listening to street musicians. They suggest a vision of what life everywhere should be: peaceful, leisurely, considerate. Denise Provost’s lines weave a scaffold of ordinary scenes; the poetry happens in the spaces between, where it brings us the humane, and the extraordinary.”
-Adnan Onart, author of The Passport You Asked For; winner of the 2011 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award
“City of Stories is a book of poems full of awareness and clarity. The verse is strikingly steady and deep-rooted, the subjects oddly near and pertinent, as public as a bridge or tower clock, private as exchanges overheard between parents and children; from the gentrification of endeared neighborhoods, to the maddening rhetoric of our lawmakers. In these poems, Provost demonstrates simply dangerous wit and agility with language. The great surprise the collection offers us is all the fun she manages to have and impart along the way. Here are poems that fairly read themselves to us and then stay with us to remember.”
-Michael T. Steffen, author of Partner, Orchard, Day Moon
About Denise
Denise Provost has published in such journals as the Bagel Bards anthologies, Ibbetson Street, Muddy River Poetry Review, qarrtsiluni, Quadrille, Poetry Porch’s Sonnet Scroll, Sanctuary, and Light Quarterly. She received the New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen award in 2021, and the Best Love Sonnet award from the Maria C. Faust Sonnet Competition in 2012. Her chapbook Curious Peach was published by Ibbetson Street Press in 2019, and her collection City of Stories is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press.