I Want to Take You Everywhere by Cassandra Manzolillo

“I Want to Take You Everywhere goes there. Our speaker’s demands hover in the liminal and faux pas region where the erotic meets the paternal/maternal. We are invited into the interrogation of the lovesick self, the impulse for proximity to the point of self-destruction. It’s an interrogation that bears fruit. A book whose formal variations and willingness to cross the line and keep right on rolling will keep you turning the pages!”

—Kyle McCord, Author of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult

“Eros, like Lear, must sometimes wander unhoused across a cruel landscape. How wonderful, then, to read the poetry of Cassandra Manzolillo, there to find desire sheltered in its brightest insouciance and in the full flourish of actual yearning. There is a tireless, guileless presence in these poems that I find both admirable and original.”

—Donald Revell

Exquisitely raw with love story, this book touches the divine where it hurts—asking love to be eternal and the fountain of all life’s meaning. Flowing with descriptions of ephemera: “shared wheezing laughs,” and the top of the beloved’s head smelling “like church and a baby,” Manzolillo writes with perfect pitch. “I want to hear you sing that song you never wrote and scrapped before the first note.” These poems in fact hit the page the way that the song could have begun in thin air. They ring with the integrity of simple and clear images, and an intensity belonging to early stages of love, linking them to this subject of much world literature. Manzolillo offers a contemporary view that reaches back in time: “I only like macho men in hardy heels and chiseled corsets.” The speaker asks, “Can’t I just keep what’s left?” As in the fragments of Sappho, incompleteness fits the condition of the speaker’s heart. The numbness of years falls away in a reading of I Want to Take You Everywhere.

—Jenny Grassl, author of Magicholia

This is a book of desperate love. There is no artifice here. Every poem in Cassandra Manzolillo’s debut says exactly what it means: that thirst to be loved, that infirmity of being human, that yearning for connection at all costs, that “explosion of feelings / I never want it to end,” that “lay on top of me, till we are nothing more,” that “I am not a person when in love Iam not a person when in love I am not a person when in love,” that knowledge that the love you seek is so painful as to exterminate you, but goddamn you want it anyway..

— Elizabeth Colen

Cassandra Manzolillo is a poet from Long Island, New York. Her poetry has appeared in Gandy Dancer and Cosmic Double. Cassandra has a BFA in creative writing & literature from Stony Brook University. I Want To Take You Everywhere is her first book.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 91 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-453-6

$18

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