Parallel Press Poetry Chapbooks

Marquees of Buffalo
Dennis Trudell
$10

"Me was movies.../Married or divorced – Saturday night,/I'm there like a church..../Lights would dim,/then come on inside me." Trudell's richly imaginative poems explore how the "shifting, bluish, magical beam" of a projector sends its "narrowing dust-glints through...heart[s]...." They propose plots, reenact roles, set scenes, celebrate movie moments. They are colorful and subtle, enticing the reader with memorable stories and characters. Trudell seems fascinated by the curious, almost symbiotic relationship between movies and moviegoers. On the one hand, he recounts experiences at the movies; on the other, he illustrates how movies become our experiences as film images are replayed (relived) in thought and memory. Thus we assimilate vibrant moments in movies as high points in our lives. "Her long thighs/sent percussion-beats through calves/and shoes to floors – which sent them/toward me, grinning at videotape/sixty years later..../She danced like Mother/almost laughed sometimes: like I/breathe in the act of love." Whether the companionship of such images is real or vicarious, their comfort can seem solidly tangible. "My father gets up in the middle of the night/to watch an old movie on cable television –/because he can't sleep. He has done this before./He will do it again/...He lives alone./Because my mother died...and sometimes he looks/at her absence on the black sofa..../The movie has a name,/but he doesn't know it..../My father returns/to bed and goes to sleep. Or does not..." Trudell repeatedly reveals for us a truth we know but may not have realized so fully before: movies may not be "real life," yet their impress on our lives can be as real as it gets.

Dennis Trudell grew up in Buffalo, New York. A retired professor of English from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, he received his B.A. from Denison University and his M.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Trudell’s poems have been published in many literary journals, chapbooks, and anthologies. His story “Gook” was chosen for an O. Henry Prize volume. Trudell has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wisconsin Arts Board. In 1996, the University of Wisconsin Press published Fragments in Us: Recent & Earlier Poems, for which he won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. In 1996, Trudell also published Full Court: A Literary Anthology of Basketball, (Breakaway Books). A collection of stories, Vast, Brief Days and Nights, is currently under submission. Trudell lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife Dee.

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