Opera House Arterial by Anne-Adele Wight

Anne-Adele Wight's new masterpiece Opera House Arterial is a fierce testimony of the power that one archetype alone can create––the Opera House. Part trickster, part behemoth, part lover, part spy, part friendly cadaver––like ""sparrow bones in a cup."" Or ""a mug of phosphorus."" Anne-Adele told me once about the Opera House and I was amazed. The Opera House, she said, has a mind of its own. It manifests and it delivers. If you read this book, you, too, will experience the Opera House in all its ""metal breathing,"" all of its ""spinal rattle... from deep within."" And you will be a much more magical person as a result.

––Debrah Morkun

Anne-Adele Wight’s marvelous Opera House Arterial, reminds us that the opera house is an omnipresent vaudevillian all-encompassing elegant cycle that both “throws us off course” and leaves us “unable to distinguish between myth and geography.” The musicality of these poems could easily fill a huge theater, Wight’s deft repetition echoing from balcony to balcony to orchestra pit. Like Gertrude Stein’s word portraits, these poems are language game and omniscient narrator, main road and irresistible detours. An opera house is an opera house is an “altar of snakes,” a “parade of orange umbrellas,” “a scrim of combines.” Everyone needs to read this book. Multiple times. Because “what the opera house does to your mind is” part oxygenated crystallographic page space part rhythmic heaven ballroom gait. Thank you, Anne-Adele Wight, for giving us this voice jeweled place.

––Erica Kaufman

A converter to direct current from alternates, opera house is around and through us, moving without hints of electrostatic charge. It morphs from shape to species to forces of weather––in wind, atop mountains, between lovers and at the bottom of the sea. Does the opera house confer momentum on illicit affairs? Dionysian or Apollonian, you make the call. This book is a study exercise for an end of the world and the strange force that moves us through its traffic.

––Frank Sherlock

Anne-Adele Wight’s Opera House Arterial pursues a critical mass of opera houses. Opera house to draw borders. Opera house to recognize neighbors. Opera house to perform and invent. Opera house to illustrate the elemental. In these poems, one’s own opera house is taken up in Wight’s invitation to “discuss and debate as a group exercise.” Wight takes seriously the work of setting the stages, orchestrating the scores, and cueing the voices. She does not forget to acknowledge their limits.

––Michelle Taransky

Drawn to water, we chase ourselves as anything. So cities, or insistent return to the arteries––here, in Wight's work, bright red blood as music. There, the opera house again, planetary: poem as through street, getting you where you need to go. Roam this globe, astral debris.

––Ryan Eckes

Anne-Adele Wight is an active member of the Philadelphia poetry landscape. Her work has been published widely and featured at many local venues. She is the author of Sidestep Catapult (BlazeVOX, 2011). The opera house has followed her around since 1983 and only recently agreed to show its faces.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 82 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-118-4