Description

The Fog

by Mary C. Florio

Mary Florio is interested in the concept of transmission, of how so many things—virus, hate, despair, fear—all the willful seeds of undoing—follow us poor humans around in a cloud of unknowing. The pandemic has taught the world loneliness, but we have always been lonely, and wounded. We just can’t see it. We’re in the fog, always.

Enjoy a video of Mary reading from the book:

Mary Florio — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (July 2021)

About the Author

Mary C. Florio has been writing poetry for over 20 years. Early successes include second place in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition. In 2017, she was featured in Nasty Woman Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. She has collaborated on two books with award-winning book artist Miriam Schaer: Cinderella, Ever After and The Posture Queen, and most recently was a finalist in the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival’s ekphrastic poetry contest.

Early Praise for The Fog:

Mary Florio’s book is more than aptly titled The Fog. These poems seem shrouded in mist, the meaning always elusive, as though we are forced to drive through veils to find the meaning through this surreal landscape. What an exquisite and beautiful book!

—Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award winner

In Mary Florio’s remarkable debut, lushly musical poems of striking imagination and wit chronicle a world reduced by the Covid pandemic to one in which “All the party lights are out,” and creatures both human and animal approach being undone by isolation, loneliness and peril. But though grounded in an altered, wounded planet that “can’t stop/ whining about its pain as if pain were/ something new,” Florio’s tart, provocative, and gorgeously visual poems chronicle what no pandemic can distract us from—the fundamental necessity to connect, to understand, to love—or, at least, to arrive at what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion.” Mary Florio’s The Fog is a triumph, capturing truths so clear and elemental we might, in our justifiable fear, have failed to recognize them.

—Catherine Doty, author of Wonderama
and Momentum