Saturday, November 28, 2015

Is Lenny DellaRocca The Sleep Talker? Yes, He Is!

NightBallet is very pleased to announce the publication of
The Sleep Talker by Lenny DellaRocca!
 
 

The Sleep Talker takes you on a dreamlike waltz through a surreal, but comforting, landscape.  In this book, you will encounter an old wizard, an architect, a library of imagined books, mirror people, a genie, a window collector, a man who teaches children to fly.  DellaRocca's sweet phrasing compels the reader to journey deeper and deeper into the poems:


"This is a wizard's spell cast by pen and wires, pipes, footsteps and sawhorses, a man dreaming in blue geometry."

"I arrive when the sun dusts the world with a burning feather, carry a sack of broken mirrors, on each shard instructions written in moonlight: How Not to Fall Off the World:"

"And now a piece of the Little Dipper slips through the window.  The sun comes up.  There's a small white feather on the floor."



 
The Sleep Talker is 28 pages long and contains 21 poems.  The cover, which boasts a gorgeous and somehow haunting photograph taken and artfully rendered by George Wallace, is the palest green. The textured cardstock insert is a midnight blue, and the text is printed on textured white paper. 

Lenny DellaRocca has had poems published in many journals and magazines since 1980, including Nimrod, Seattle Review, Long Island Quarterly, and Chiron Review.  A Pushcart nominee, he is former president of the Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation,which facilitated workshops and readings by Denise Duhamel, Michael Hettich, Richard Blanco, and others.

Denise Duhamel has this to say about The Sleep Talker:

"Lenny DellaRocca gives us fabulously fabulist prose poems in The Sleep Talker, a chapbook of dreamy utterances, miniature philosophies, and shape-shifting epiphanies.  Della Rocca is a poet of great intelligence, wit, and skill.  He does what every poet (and driver on wet roads) should dohe steers into the skid."

Michael Hettich says:

"In these beautifully nuanced, artfully crafted poems, Lenny DellaRocca takes us into worlds where magic and dream sing to us like almost forgotten memories, in language as clear as the very air we breathe.   This is soulful, heartfelt, wonderfully strange poetry that teems with luminous images and satisfies with the magic of its narrative drive.  Though reminiscent of folk-tales and magical-realist fables, DellaRocca's poems are his own original and fresh creations.  His is a mature voice and a welcome addition to the choir of contemporary American poetry."

The Sleep Talker can be yours for only $5 plus $3 shipping/handling.  Order your copy and allow DellaRocca's magic to take you by the hand and lead you into another world of moonlight, white feathers, and libraries with long corridors.