Blue Guide
Lee Briccetti
In Blue Guide, Lee Briccetti is both archeologist and tour guide reassembling shards of personal and historical narratives in poems that are stunning in their lyric wisdom. She moves easily, albeit restlessly, between past and present, from the streets of ancient Rome to post-9/ll lower Manhattan, concluding that “The dead/ always tell us live”. Through this journey, she constructs a new architecture of the soul that ultimately realizes “In this happiness we build each other—”
“Blue Guide, Rome, Gianicolo” from Blue Guide:
The two-person elevator
that smells of pastries makes my lover so close
joy in him is sealed into my childhood.
Days, dogs off the leash bark at fountains’ aerial braids of water.
Nights, streets’ incandescence through a shutter.
Visiting my first country I am always a stranger
but distance is familiar and light.
In this happiness we build each other—
Renaissance painters laying down their blue skies,
inventing a way to see the world.
Blue, earthly. Human love, my true.
