The Persistence of a Bathing Suit by Cristina Trapani-Scott

This collection is a celebration of life, an acknowledgement of heart-ache, a searing series of poems that manages  “to step out of the in-between / where past and present twist / like filaments around each / other…”  Cristina Trapani-Scott’s poetry is musical, visual, sensual, and full of brilliant observations and precisely-rendered moments.  This is work you’ll read again and again, and want to share.  The world this poet brings to the page is odd, and very lovely, and her poetry is as full of risks as the act of loving one another is, and just as important, remarkable, and full of big and little miracles.

–Laura Kasischke author of The Infinitesimals

The Persistence of a Bathing Suit by Cristina Trapani-Scott is a book of disclosures and reckonings. As the collection’s title suggests in its allusion to Dali’s famous painting, it is not the distortions of memory that will be the subject of investigation, but the mortal body through which time runs, an investigation spurred on by breast cancer. From that place they ray out to a daughter as well as an aunt in Sicily and a town that bears the author’s maiden name. Whether in the well-wrought images of poems like “A Day at the Chemo Spa” or in rhythmic pulses of the heart in “Climbing a Mountain on Horseback in July,” the poems in this engaging collection look and listen; pulsing with life, they move.
—Debra Kang Dean author of Fugitive Blues