The Fatherlands

THE FATHERLANDS is a neo-classical gallery, Michael Trocchia the guide, showing us portraits, landscapes, sculptures, paintings, a collage of a time long past but as real and present as the space at the end of this period. In the background you will hear an overture of whispers, where ancestors have shaped his art, and our vision of it.

Praise for THE FATHERLANDS:

"Someone might say that THE FATHERLANDS is a rebuke, that it is a sort of anarchist screed. The book is certainly a vehement denouncement of the present state of affairs in American life, politics, and letters. But Trocchia is no coward, and he does not tear down without raising up. The world he wants for us is one that is his own, a world of contradiction, of paradox, of subtlety and hope in the actual. The seeing he prescribes for us is unfettered sight. THE FATHERLANDS is not so much a poetry book as it is a guide to a way of thinking that moves beyond the sad possessiveness of our epoch. It does this in its essential fabric, in the mechanism by which objects are used and described, in the basic manner of assigning meaning and value. Trocchia's mastery of these modes is sure and unfaltering, his invention tireless. Pay attention to this man."

- Jesse Ball, author of SILENCE ONCE BEGUN and THE CURFEW

"Michael Trocchia's The Fatherlands is beautiful, its narrative threads graceful and lithe."

- JA Tyler, author of THE ZOO, A GOING

“Michael Trocchia’s THE FATHERLANDS is not an easy book to categorize. The Fatherlands is either a series of prose poems or a short novel. In either case, it is a witty, evocative, and perceptive meditation on the ties—sometimes deep, sometimes accidental—that join persons to families, families to territories, territories to texts, and texts to literatures.”

- Robert Viscusi, author of ELLIS ISLAND and ASTORIA