“Pouring light into the place my heart is meant to be”: A Review of THE NEW ECONOMY by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
- Apr 13
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 15
Gabrielle Calvocoressi
The New Economy
Copper Canyon Press / 2025 / 125 pp / $22.00
Reviewed by Morrow Dowdle / April 2026
When Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s most recent poetry collection, The New Economy, was announced as a finalist for the seventy-sixth National Book Award, it came as no surprise to followers of Calvocoressi’s work, long-known for its meticulous attention to poetic craft, psychological complexity, and imaginative use of overtly fictional subjects.
Readers who loved Calvocoressi’s previous collections may be surprised, however, at The New Economy’s more reserved, introspective approach. Here, there are no traces of the dramatic persona poems, such as those about a world-weary boxer in Apocalyptic Swing, or the cast of characters telling the story of the legendary pilot’s last flight and disappearance in The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart. Rather, The New Economy is conversational and vulnerable, more relaxed in both form and diction as it explores the first-person speaker’s personal identity as a queer, nonbinary, middle-aged person who has contended with various physical and emotional challenges over much of their life.
Despite the exuberance of the opening poem, “Hammond B-3 Organ Cistern,” which announces in its first lines, “The days I don’t want to kill myself / are extraordinary,” the tone of the book is often unabashedly mournful. The speaker takes us through the museum of their pain, from childhood to present, though not in any particular sequence. In “Path,” the speaker invites us to “[c]ome / over and see what it is to want // to be alive. I’m getting used to it / and still sometimes look for ways / to be unhappy.” Further along in the poem, after listing several recent physical ailments, the speaker confides:
. . . . The pain needs
somewhere to go, I reasoned.
But for real? Why should it
keep living inside me? What
about my radiance that God
told me about. Those nights
I’d wake up in the far room
of the house. Wondering why
the bed was spinning. Me
in my footed pajamas with my
camel and my bear. Too scared
to scream . . . .
Poems such as “Path” invite the reader to labor alongside the speaker as they grapple with the nature and meaning of suffering, including whether and how it will ever end. At the same time, these poems do not leave the reader without at least a hint of optimism, the sense that survival is possible no matter what the circumstances: “And then a voice / from the river telling me / I’d be okay. A voice in the // darkness making a light / of me.”
The most engaging poems in the collection feature what the speaker calls the “light body,” which is the most authentic and essential part of a person’s self—a kind of “soul,” if you will. It is a condition of being which the speaker, self-conscious of their fallibilities, strives to access. The light body lies beyond the constraints of illness, biological gender, citizenship of a particular country, and even humanity, which comes with a great capacity for harm towards itself as well as all the natural environment. In “Neighbor Reckoner Cistern Michael Comes to Help,” the speaker addresses the title character: “I’ve dreamed of a body like yours. / Adorning my light body. Not so tall. Muscular. / My whole life I’ve wanted my shirt to fit / the way yours does.”
The poems which focus on the light body, furthermore, often delve into compelling speculative territory, in which the speaker takes a long historical, even cosmic, view of human circumstances. “Light Body Cistern Be Gone from the Place You Almost Destroyed” describes an entire procession of light bodies on a journey of repentance and atonement for human greed, hatred, and destruction: “We pulled the blood from the ground / as we walked . . . . / And it seemed a lifetime ago. When we had / bathed ourselves in blood of everything / we’d made weaker than us.” The poem “Miss You. Would like to grab that chilled tofu that we love.” even hints that the light body might exist beyond life itself, as the speaker entreats a deceased loved one to join them for a meal, stating, “You can come in your light / body or skeleton or be invisible I don’t even / care.”
Many of the poems in the book’s second half, a series titled “Lent Cisterns: Could I Ever Write a Poem Again After These Years of Bleeding These Years of Mourning?” examine the ways in which the creative process can be paralyzed under the pressure of personal challenges, including the sense of being overwhelmed by the disorder of the external world. The image of the “cistern” recurs in poems throughout both sections of The New Economy. The cistern—a waterproof, often underground, reservoir designed to collect and store rainwater or treated water—serves in this collection as a symbolic container for intense contemplation. Calvocoressi gives voice to the sentiment that many artists have been experiencing acutely over the past decade: What does it mean to create amid so much sociopolitical chaos, violence, and despair?
The speaker of the “Lent Cisterns” also shares their struggle to write over a two-year period and the feelings of dread that accompanied it. In “Ring,” the speaker asks, “Could I just love it / again? My fingers moving / along the keyboard. The / shape a poem can make / on the page.” These poems contain the sense of the speaker arduously writing their way out of that fallow period into the “new economy” of the collection’s title. The poem “Karma Affirmation Cistern Don’t Be Afraid Keep Going Towards the Horror” asserts, “Sometimes the things / that matter to you won’t matter / to anyone but you. And that’s redemption. / The poem that means nothing to anyone / but you.” And that, Calvocoressi insists repeatedly, is more than enough.
Morrow Dowdle is the author of the chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024), the forthcoming chapbook Missing Woman (Charlotte Lit Press, 2026), and the forthcoming debut full-length collection, Heartsick Requiem (Riot in Your Throat Press, 2026). A former physician assistant, they now work as a creative and administrative assistant for NC Public Art. They are an MFA candidate at Spalding University and live in Durham, North Carolina. See more at morrowdowdle.com.