Connie Deanovich (USA)
1960
Born in 1960, Connie M. Deanovich received her B.A. in English at Columbia College in Chicago in 1983 and her M.A. at DePaul University in Chicago in 1990. From 1983 to 1988 she worked as a publicity coordinator at The Poetry Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon receiving her M.A., she became a full-time instructor at Kishwaukee College in Malta, Illinois and, from 1992-1993, an adjunct instructor at Elgin Community College in Elgin, Illinois.
In 1997 she was awarded the Whiting Writer’s Award. She had previously received a General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers in 1990. In 2000 her work was anthologized in American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press).
In 1996, she published her first collection of poetry, Watusi Titanic and in 1999 Zoland Books published her Zombie Jet. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
BOOKS OF POETRY
Watusi Titanic(New York: Timken Publishers, 1996); Zombie Jet (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Zoland Books, 1999)
╬Winner of the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English
2005-2006
Though We Wanted It to Stay
the building’s audition
was its demolition
lit from beneath by cop cars
an industrial octopus squeezed it to pieces
the orphans clustered by the pay phone
except for the one was smoking
he and his hat sat bow-legged
on the steps
just try breathing normal here
the time is always twilight
the assassins cold as a coin
with a foreign hole in the middle
just try
we may fling out our arms
“this is our world!”
but the world ignores such distractions
its machines go on fluently
like gorgeous quick-footed doctors
and we observe the operation
soon behind a turquoise curtain
we’ll need more food
something simple on a disposable plate
a glass of cold milk to wash it down with
a glance at the sunflowers out back
57 yellow heads
their seeds not yet vanished inside crows
just try making slow go fast go slow
air changes when it wants to
passing from one symphony to another
like a string of sailor’s whistles on a ship departing
massively at first
across the ocean that envelopes it
___
Reprinted from New American Writing, no. 23 (2005). Copyright ©2005 by Connie M. Deanovich.