Croak is a frog-and-girl opera in three parts, played out like a YouTube mashup of mid-century cartoons set to a contemporary pop song. It parades, mutilates, and reacquaints Kermit the Frog with Girl 00010111, Michigan J with Aristophanes, and biblical plagues with caged canaries in a vaudevillian play of time, culture, gender, and narrative. Combining vivisection and classical literature, empirical observation and philosophical speculation, Jenny Sampririsi's grotesque characters splash and sparkle before moving toward their inevitable narrative end.'As invigorating and idiosyncratic a collection as this reviewer has encountered in some time. A must-read.' – Seth Abramson, Huffington Post 'As invigorating and idiosyncratic a collection as this reviewer has encountered in some time. A must-read.' – Seth Abramson, Huffington Post'I haven't read a book of poetry as tonally sly (strange), and as formally surprising – in that it never levels off into a settled shape, though the voicing is always grounded in ongoing immediacy – as Jenny Sampirisi's Croak in a long time. The world this writing performs takes deformation as a kind of functional and nonetheless staged condition its characters give off and exploit, emotional intelligence streaming beneath the action with a perfectly measured balance of humour and consequence.' – Anselm Berrigan, author of Free Cell and Notes From Irrelevance
close this panelJenny Sampirisi is the author of the novel Is/Was from Insomniac Press. She is the managing editor of BookThug, where she also edits the Department of Narrative Studies imprint, which focuses on innovative prose. She is the co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing, a seriesof reading and writing workshops designed and facilitated by working writers. She teaches English Literature and Composition at Ryerson University. Croak is her first poetry collection.
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