The Silence of Doorways

The first collection of poetry by Sharon Venezio, with a foreword by Dorothy Barresi. 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 BarresiWhat 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/ where life began." - Suzanne LummisIn 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