New for 2000: Parallel Press releases ‘Luck’

“Luck” by Marilyn Annucci is the first chapbook published in 2000 from the Parallel Press, an imprint of the UW–Madison General Library System.

Chapbooks are small-format literary works, usually of poetry or essays. The author lives in Madison and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in the Department of Languages and Literatures.

Annucci has worked as a writer and editor, and has taught at the Western Pennsylvania Young Writers Institute and the University of Pittsburgh, where she received a master’s of fine arts in poetry. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including Southern Poetry Review, The Journal, and Poet Lore.

Annucci will give a reading from “Luck” Friday, Feb. 18, at 6:30 p.m. at A Room of One’s Own Bookstore and Coffeehouse, 307 W. Johnson St., Madison.

Annucci’s poetry is both wryly playful and dead serious. In these poems everything from the kitchen drawer to a spool of dental floss becomes a take-off place for her imagination. In “Desire Under the Cheese Grater” she writes:

“I want to be reckless as measuring spoons/to fling my big, smaller, small heads back,/dream of ginger, of cinnamon,/sprawl akimbo on the flowered tack paper.”

These poems show Annucci’s search for moments and objects of meaning; in them she reveals overlooked beauty, everyday cruelties, and small acts of heroism.

Other chapbooks from the Parallel Press include: “The Perfect Day” by Andrea Potos; “Hosannas” by Katharine Whitcomb; “Apparition” by Max Garland; “Sure Knowledge” by Elizabeth Oness.

Each book is $10. A one-year subscription to six books is $50. For more information about the Parallel Press, call (608) 263-4929, or visit: http://www.library.wisc.edu/projects/glsdo/parallelpress.html