This week’s other featured book, “The Islands of Iros,” by L.M. Brackley, can be found by scrolling below, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.
THE BOOK: The Revlon Slough.
PUBLISHED IN: 2018.
THE AUTHOR: Ray DiZazzo.
THE EDITOR: Sean Dillon, Design by Gabrielle David.
THE PUBLISHER: 2Leaf Press.
SUMMARY: The Revlon Slough is meant simply to explore
the people, creatures and situations that we all experience. It is not
an activist or confessional collection, but rather a group of poems
that focuses, through powerful imagery, on the often unnoticed and
unusual perspectives we navigate continually.
THE BACK STORY: Several years ago, on an afternoon drive through the farmlands in my area, I passed a sign that read ‘THE REVLON SLOUGH”. Being a word guy, this juxtaposition of two words that would seem like complete opposites, immediately caught my eye. Revlon: lashes, lipstick, rouge; and Slough: silt, mud, overgrown reeds. Beauty versus ugliness. How could anyone possibly name a slough Revlon? That lead to the beginnings of a new poem and a personal exploration of the difference between beauty and ugliness. After a good deal of thought and writing I ended up with a large group of poems and a simple, time-worn cliché: Beauty and ugliness are not two different states. Either can be considered beautiful or ugly. It’s only the viewer, “the eye of the beholder” that sets them apart.
WHY THIS TITLE: The title seemed to fit the book’s beauty and ugliness theme. Some of the poems are what certain “beholders” would see as beautiful and others would see as ugly. Where they fall on the beauty/ugliness scale is the perception of the reader.
WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: I believe a good deal of the poetry circulating today comes off as aloof or vague and convoluted. The reader has to dig to find the message or meaning. The Revlon Slough is, for the most part, clear and easily understandable poetry. But it also presents some often overlooked and very unusual perspectives. Hopefully these qualities offer the reader the surprising, ah-ah moments that lead to personal revelations and a desire to keep turning pages.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“The Revlon Slough has managed to do the nearly impossible: to
enter into the minds and experiences of the human and non-human world he imagines with both fresh imagery and insight.” — Laurel Ann Bogen, poet, writer and literary curator
“What Ray DiZazzo has written is a series of vivid, emotional experiences coming from the printed page into the readers’ hearts and souls. He has managed to powerfully communicate the intimate thoughts and feelings that many, if not all of us, experience, but never find ways to express.” — Phillips Wylly, writer, producer, director/
“Ray DiZazzo is a wordsmith whose poetry is inspired from a lifelong journey of human experiences. The Revlon Slough lays those experiences bare for his readers with a wide range of poems: Strident and moving, heartfelt and nostalgic, some loving and some cruel and irreverent.” — Ralph Philips, writer, producer, director.
AUTHOR PROFILE: I’m 76 years old, married for 52 of those years, and having a great time creating what I believe is writing that matters. I have published fiction, poetry, criticism, nonfiction and self-help in commercial and literary magazines, newspapers and 14 books. A few of the magazines include: “The Mid-Atlantic Review”, “Valley Magazine”, “The Christian Science Monitor”, “Inc.”, “The Berkeley Review”, “Poetry Now”, and “The Coachella Review”. I am the recipient of the Percival Roberts Book Award and the Rhysling Award. I am also a Pushcart Prize
nominee. My work has been anthologized in “Contemporary Literary Criticism” and other publications.
A half-hour documentary program scripted by me for KOCE TV won the first Los Angeles Emmy in the Education category. In addition, I’ve published four books of poetry: Clovin’s Head, Red Hill Press, 1976, Songs for a Summer Fly, Kenmore Press (Chapbook), 1978; The Water Bulls, Granite-Collen, 2009, and The Revlon Slough, 2Leaf Press/University of Chicago Press, 2018. My newest book of poems, Tropic Then, will be released in April 2023, from 2Leaf Press/The University of Chicago Press. A search of my name on Amazon, Google, or IMDB will provide more background.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: I believe this book will help readers become more aware of, and thus better understand, the life experiences we navigate every day. My hope is that this awareness springs from imagery discovered on the pages of The Revlon Slough.
SAMPLE:
Four Poems.
THE REVLON SLOUGH
With no connection to a rouge or lipstick,
it has hollowed down to a wound of puddles
overhung with bush, and running jagged
through the Camarillo farmlands.
Strings of silt wave in its shallow pools
dank with the smell of tangled roots
and earth gone bad, home to tunnel webs
families of flies and strutting killdeer.
A single heron stands in the curved shallow
distance, where migrants sit along its banks
in the orange afternoons eating boiled pork
and telling tales of spirits in the corn.
THE WATER BULLS
The water bulls are wrong.
As round with love
as they may be
as bloated tight
with the tenderness
of weight and dreams
their sun has set for good.
Huddled in the reeds
their crescent horns ringing
with the frequencies of night
they never see, never understand
that stars give off so little
warmth, lunar light is icy
and the calves are
shivering beside them
THE STEW CUTTER
Over years,
and with the loss of seven fingers
he has learned to swing the cleaver
in the first and third fingers
of his right hand.
His left palm (whitish nubs
and a muscled thumb) is used to situate
and feed the slabs of bleeding meat.
I am waiting for an order
flinching at the blade
as time and time again it sinks
beside the cutter’s last thumb.
He glances up and
reading my expression, chuckles.
“Only thing I know, “ he says
“besides a cleaver and a lean stew
is how to play guitar.
And that’s no way
to make a living.”
SNIPER
(Vietnam)
At heights like this
horizons bend to haze-arcs
enemy encampments, where
in one today, a tiny general is
stepping from a jungle tent
into the convex gleam of
calibrated glass and cross-hairs.
And far away above this
invisible in face-paint and
a shawl of weeds, you are
lying spread on something like
a precipice in heaven.
Pleased with the lack of wind
tranquil in the solitude of height
and distance, you wrap a finger
on the trigger’s iron curve
brace for the stock-punch
take the breath
exhale
hold
pull.
LOCAL OUTLETS: Bank of Books, Ventura CA
WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Most online book sites, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
PRICE: $18.95
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: rv.dizazzo@gmail.com.