About the Book
The Box of Torrone is an unusual book of poetry about six flavors of the Italian nougat torrone, each flavor associated with a city in Italy, based on an actual box of torrone that the author received from his beloved Italian aunt years ago. This is a project that developed over years as associations between the cities and flavors of torrone coalesced to create a delicious blend of history, culture, poetics, and aesthetics.The Box of Torrone begins with a three-part suite of poems, "In the Box of Torrone", in summary of the trip to come, tracking a journey up the Italian peninsula with stops at six major cities, Naples, Rome, Pisa, Florence, Venice, and Milan. This book takes shape from other terrains and histories, including Mexican jungles, Los Angeles, Fort Lee, New Jersey, and even the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory. The pairings seem classic and yet unusual: Lemons / NAPLES, Chocolate / ROME, Coconuts / PISA, Coffee / FLORENCE, Almonds / VENICE, Hazelnuts / MILAN.Aside from the geographical and confectionary travelogue, The Box of Torrone is structured with a delicate network of time travel from the past to the future with a lingering layover in the eternal present, the City of Rome, informed by the concept of "yesterday, today, and tomorrow" and the joys of international cinema.Highly unusual in its conception and composition with visual and aurally stimulating elements, The Box of Torrone has an international and yet personal theme, timeless in its breadth, suitable for readers who wish to explore a world of flavors and an armchair voyage to Italy.
About the Author :
JOHN J. TRAUSE, the Director of Oradell Public Library, is the author of Why Sing? (Sensitive Skin Press, 2017), a book of traditional and experimental poems; Picture This: For Your Eyes and Ears (Dos Madres Press, 2016), a book of poems on art, film, and photography; Exercises in High Treason (great weather for MEDIA, 2016), a book of fictive translations, found poems, and manipulated texts; Eye Candy for Andy (13 Most Beautiful... Poems for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests, Finishing Line Press, 2013); Inside Out, Upside Down, and Round and Round (Nirala Publications, 2012); Seriously Serial (Poets Wear Prada, 2007; rev. ed. 2014); and Latter-Day Litany (Éditions élastiques, 1996), the latter staged Off Broadway. His translations, poetry, prose, scholarship, and visual work appear internationally in many journals and anthologies, including Post[blank]; The Antioch Review; the artists' periodical Crossings; the Dada journal Maintenant; the journal Offerta Speciale; the Great Weather for Media anthologies It's Animal but Merciful (2012), I Let Go of the Stars in My Hand (2014), Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea (2019), Paper Teller Diorama (2021), and A Shape Produced by a Curve (2023); and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015). Marymark Press has published his visual poetry and art as broadsides and sheets. He is the subject of a 30-on-30-in-30 essay on The Operating System, written by Don Zirilli, and an author of an essay on Baroness Elsa at the same site, both in April 2016. He has shared the stage with Steven Van Zandt, Anne Waldman, Karen Finley, Andrei Codrescu, and Jerome Rothenberg; the page with Billy Collins, Lita Hornick, William Carlos Williams, Woody Allen, Ted Kooser, Victor Buono, and Pope John Paul II; and the cage with the Cumaean Sibyl, Ezra Pound, Hannibal Lecter, Andrei Chikatilo, and George "The Animal" Steele. He is a founder of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative (The Red Wheelbarrow) in Rutherford, N. J., and the former host and curator of its monthly reading series. He is fond of cunning acrostics and color-coded chiasmus.
