Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
An evocative, often mischievous remembrance and reinvention by the poet of his youth in the New York City of the '40s and '50s.In Loew's Triboro, John Allman's fourth collection of poems with New Directions, the poet recalls the movie palace in Astoria, Queens—one of the five boroughs of New York City—and its centrality to the lives and fantasies of the people in the neighborhood. In a combination of prose poems and free verse, sometimes darkly funny, Allman juxtaposes vignettes from the streets of Astoria with the movies of the period, revisioning such film noir classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and The Asphalt Jungle. The book itself becomes a narrative place where real and cinematic lives interact, where movies are the engines of history and myth and the motif of journey is implicit from the first poem to the last.Author Biography: John Allman was born in New York City in 1935. After dropping out of high school, he earned his diploma at night while working as a technician for Pepsi-Cola. He went on to get an M.A. from Syracuse University in creative writing, where he studied with Philip Booth and Delmore Schwartz. In 1976 he received the Helen Bullis Prize from Poetry Northwest, in 1983 a Pushcart Poetry Prize; and in 1984 and 1990, he was awarded National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships in Poetry. His poems, stories and essays have been widely published in such magazines as The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Antioch Review, and The Paris Review, as well as the online journals Full Circle and Blackbird. He currently lives with his wife in Katonah, NY, and spends his winters on Hilton Head Island, SC.
Synopsis
An evocative, often mischievous remembrance and reinvention by the poet of his youth in the New York City of the '40s and '50s.In Loew's Triboro, John Allman's fourth collection of poems with New Directions, the poet recalls the movie palace in Astoria, Queens—one of the five boroughs of New York City—and its centrality to the lives and fantasies of the people in the neighborhood. In a combination of prose poems and free verse, sometimes darkly funny, Allman juxtaposes vignettes from the streets of Astoria with the movies of the period, revisioning such film noir classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and The Asphalt Jungle. The book itself becomes a narrative place where real and cinematic lives interact, where movies are the engines of history and myth and the motif of journey is implicit from the first poem to the last.
Author Biography: John Allman was born in New York City in 1935. After dropping out of high school, he earned his diploma at night while working as a technician for Pepsi-Cola. He went on to get an M.A. from Syracuse University in creative writing, where he studied with Philip Booth and Delmore Schwartz. In 1976 he received the Helen Bullis Prize from Poetry Northwest, in 1983 a Pushcart Poetry Prize; and in 1984 and 1990, he was awarded National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships in Poetry. His poems, stories and essays have been widely published in such magazines as The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Antioch Review, and The Paris Review, as well as the online journals Full Circle and Blackbird. He currently lives with his wife in Katonah, NY, and spends his winters on Hilton Head Island, SC.