Amo e Canto by J.C. Reilly
Sow’s Ear Chapbook Competition Winner, 2020
Issued as Vol. XXX1.1, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review
Available through the author ($13.50)
Ever been to Venice? If you have, you’ll recognize many familiar landmarks in Amo e Canto by J.C. Reilly, winner of the 2020 Sow’s Ear Chapbook Contest, and will likely remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.
If you haven’t visited this magical Italian city, reading Reilly’s 24-poem collection will transport you there with its vivid, fast-moving vignettes chronicling a traveler’s journey in stanza-less lines that snake together like so many canals that span each page and fuse in a dizzying scene full of imagery and artifact. Translated from Italian, the book’s title means “I love and I sing,” and indeed Reilly’s lyrical notes comprise a language of their own, conveying the author’s passion and longing in an immersive experience that manages to be both soothing and haunting at the same time.
Each poem opens with a descriptive overview sentence that begins, “In Venice.” Everything that follows reflects the author’s intense gaze into and around her environment. The hybrid-genre style and sparkling language extant in this collection create an easy readability, and each poem is a microcosm of the collection; the overall work is a tapestry in which every piece magnifies the radiance of the whole.
In “Perduta,” the first poem, Reilly’s speaker has just arrived in Venice, where she tells us in the poem’s first line, “losing yourself is an art form.” We land with her, quickly finding ourselves part of the picture-within-a-picture she describes in rich metaphors embedded like nesting dolls. Immediately we begin to participate in the speaker’s journey to and within this storied city.
All of the poems in Amo e Canto are titled in Italian, and reading “Perduta” (Italian for “lost”), we find ourselves here—but not here. We wonder: Where are we going? Will we get there? Will we be intact when we do? Reilly understands that we don’t know the answers to these questions—though we may think we do—and we never will. Yet, absent those certainties, Reilly’s speaker seems to confront the fact that our lives are only points between the known and the unknown.
The speaker’s dilemma is both existential and modern, and she conveys it throughout the book’s pages, her vulnerability couched in sharp humor, which makes her quite relatable:
You cry an aria of tragedy, bereft as any heroine who will surely die affamata (starving), sonnolenta (sleepy), abbandonata (abandoned), not from consumption or a broken heart, but because you do not have a working cell phone.
In “Domande” (Questions), the speaker practices her Italian with commonly asked questions, some of which would readily identify her to native speakers as a tourist, or as particular, or indecisive. At the same time, she is preoccupied by questions of her own: “Chi sono? Cosa sto facendo dell amia vita? Who am I? What am I doing with my life? And the question that seems to haunt her most:
And what, finally, of love, of the question closest to your Murano glass heart? … That question you cannot bear to ask at all, not in any language. Non mai (not ever.)
“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness,” wrote Maya Angelou. Reading Amo e Canto, one comes away with a sense of its lyrics as songs of wonder, longing, and rapture—poems that witness to the speaker’s inner restlessness, but also serve as balm to readers’ own lonely spaces, interior and exterior, which persist no matter where we find ourselves.
–
Note: The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review traditionally published the winning chapbook contest entry as its full issue, but the review ceased publication in 2021 with Issue 30.1—Reilly’s Amo e Canto. The publisher mailed the issue to subscribers, but it is not conventionally available for sale. However, copies are available directly through the author for $13.50.
Sarah Carey is the author of two poetry chapbooks, including Accommodations (2019), winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Valparaiso Review, Bear Review, and elsewhere. Visit her on Twitter @SayCarey1.