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June Sylvester Saraceno is originally from Elizabeth City, North Carolina. She received a BA from East Carolina University and an MFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her work has appeared in various journals including California Quarterly, Ginosko, The Pedestal, Poetry Motel, The Rebel, Silk Road, Smartish Pace, Sunspinner, Tar River Poetry and The Village Rambler; as well as two anthologies: Intimate Kisses: the poetry of sexual pleasure and Passionate Hearts: the poetry of sexual love, now in a second printing. Her chapbook Mean Girl Trips was published fall 2006 by Pudding House Press. Her first full length collection of poetry, Altars of Ordinary Light, was released by Plain View Press in 2007. She is currently English Program Chair at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe and founding editor of the Sierra Nevada College Review.
She lives with her husband, Anthony Saraceno, and son, Dylan Victor, in Truckee, California.
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| book signing at AWP 2008 |
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Reviews of Altars of Ordinary Light
Nevada writer and publisher Ellen Hopkins, author of Crank, Burned and Impulse, writes:
“The title is apropos for a book that seeks to shed light on ordinary living--childhood, family, marriage, womanhood. Saraceno's verse is accessible, yet filled with vivid imagery. Each poem begs to be reread to gain understanding of not only the poet but the reader.”
Dr. Peter Makuck, professor emeritus of East Carolina University and author of many books including Off-Season in the Promised Land, Sunken Lightship, Where We Live, and Against Distance, has this to say about the book:
“June Sylvester Saraceno, with fresh imagery and a fine ear, explores positive and negative emotional valences in situations and relationships that speak to us all. These poems, welcoming and warm, awaken intense memories in any reader who has ever had to say goodbye to home, parents, and friends, and find one’s way in a wider world. Saraceno is equally good at rendering people as she is the natural world.
Altars of Ordinary Light, in part, revives powerful memories of a coastal childhood with imagery as sharp as the scent of low tide in a salt marsh. Saraceno focuses a subject, adjusts the light and angle until it reveals what we have been too busy to see—the eloquence and sanctity of the everyday. These poems nicely balance light and dark, humor and sorrow. In “Scars,” she writes: “My body is a book / I reread the lines to find / the fierce allegory of old adventures.” Most of these poems have an urgency, and they compel as adventures do.
Entering a crowded elevator, listening to clichés in a bar, finding the body of a deceased great aunt, keeping a dead mother’s unwearable shoes, watching a young son bounce dangerously on a trampoline, working as an au pair, trying but understanding nothing of the foreign language spoken around you—these are only a few of the compelling situations in Altars of Ordinary Light. In one funny prose poem about a back-road live-music bar, a tipsy woman tells the speaker, “Girl, you just need to learn to quit thinking about yourself and dance.” These are poems that dance, laugh, and cry, June Sylvester Saraceno always looking away from the self at both people and the natural world that she renders vividly. Altars of Ordinary Light is an impressive debut.”
Nationally acclaimed poet, Lola Haskins, author of Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner's Guide to the Poetic Life, Solutions Beginning with A, and many collections of poetry including Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems, Extranjera, The Rim Benders, Hunger, Forty-Four Ambitions for the Piano and Castings writes:
“June Sylvester Saraceno opens the door of her childhood in a southern, Christian home, and introduces us to her mother, her sterner father, and her cousin, who cried for birds, who accidentally ran over a child. She lets us into the anger and pain she turns into drops of blood. Then we see her leave, home first, then marriage, to travel to France, Germany, Vancouver: waiting, waiting. Home again, she hears “You just have to stop thinking about yourself and dance.” She does. These are honest, generous poems.”
Altars of Ordinary Light Plain View Press ISBN 978-1-891386-87-9
Cover photo by Ed Book edbookphoto.com
To order Altars of Ordinary Light or Mean Girl Trips, please contact the author at june@junesaraceno.com or the publisher Plain View Press at sb@plainviewpress.net
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