The Olfactions: Poems on Perfume by Anne Gorrick

If a sign of intelligence is the ability to make connections where there are seemingly none, Anne Gorrick is a genius: How many people do you know that can conjure up the smells of a Harley motorcycle, Lapsang Souchang tea, and the Club Asteria in Turkey in a single poem? Just as a good perfume arouses memories and images that had been buried in the psyche, Anne’s poems take us on a journey through a startlingly original mind, making seemingly impossible syntactical leaps and creating a new form for poetry: the Perfume Poem, composed of top notes, middle notes and base notes, capering nimbly from the obvious surfaces of visible things to the hidden depths of the imagination and back again. Anne Gorrick’s poems are alchemical magic tricks, translating perfumes into a language that is rich in imagery, alive with perceptiveness, and wondrous strange.

—Charlotte Mandell, translator

Someone once said that after a Bach sonata, the silence that follows is still Bach. Well, after a poem from Anne Gorrick, the silence that follows is a whiff of patchouli, tar, vanilla, tea and other things… Thank you. Thank you.

—Fabrice Penot, co-founder of Le Labo fragrances

“What fats are you composed of?” What scents? “Old books, wooden furniture, dusty rooms, campfire smoke, barbecue sauce / all in this small bottle”. Do you know what a Klein bottle is? “My spine hurts, my stomach is sore.” We just arrived yesterday and have no idea what time zone we’re in. “Which is to say that the first oudh (or agarwood) that I ever smelled gave me the impression that I had walked into a new room.” A Klein bottle room. So yes. At last, Acme has conquered topological and engineering frontiers to manufacture genuine glass Klein Bottles. These are the finest closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifolds sold anywhere in our three spatial dimensions. “For example, Au Lac (Eau d’Italie by Alberto Morillas) is meant to summon the garden on a small island in the middle of an Italian lake where a 20th century Futurist painter seduces a 15th century princess (who was also a poet and devotee of Michelangelo). That tiny story alone makes me crazy with happiness”. And yet. And yet. “There is a storm everywhere”, even here. And Anne Gorrick, The Angel of The Olfactions, has her fearless wings caught in it.

—John Bloomberg-Rissman, poet

Anne Gorrick is a poet and visual artist.

She is the author of A’s Visuality, I-Formation (Book 2), I-Formation (Book 1) , and Kyotologic. She collaborated with artist Cynthia Winika to produce a limited edition artists’ book, “Swans, the ice,” she said, funded by the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

She has also co-edited (with poet Sam Truitt) In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Writing from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, 2016).

She is President of the Board of Trustees at Century House Historical Society, home of the Widow Jane Mine, an all-volunteer organization (www.centuryhouse.org) that preserves and interprets the history of the now-defunct local cement industry through the arts.

Anne Gorrick lives in West Park, New York.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 174 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-265-5

$18

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