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how do you spell the sound of crickets
Jory Post, Paola Bruni
“Write to me. Keep me alive,” wrote Jory Post to Paola Bruni as he was dying of inoperable cancer.
Hence, the quiet conversation ensued — one poet to another — an intimate, and at times playful, sharing of hopes, fears, and grief.
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About The Author
Jory Post
Jory Post was an educator, writer, and artist who lived in Santa Cruz, California. He and his wife, Karen Wallace, created handmade books and art together as JoKa Press. Jory was the co-founder and publisher of phren-z, an online literary quarterly, and founder of the Zoom Forward reading series.
His first book of prose poetry, The Extra Year, was published in 2019, and was followed by a second, Of Two Minds, in 2020. His novel, Pious Rebel, also appeared in 2020. His novel, Smith: An Unauthorized Fictography, was published in 2021.
His work has been published in Catamaran Literary Reader, Chicago Quarterly Review, Rumble Fish Quarterly, The Sun, and elsewhere. His short stories “Sweet Jesus” and “Hunt and Gather” were nominated for the 2019 Pushcart Prize.
Paola Bruni
Paola Bruni is a writer, wife, and doggie mom living on California’s Central Coast. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize judged by Ellen Bass, as well as a finalist for the Mudfish Poetry Prize.
Her poems have appeared in such prestigious journals as The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, and Catamaran Literary Reader, among others. Her short plays have been produced by Actors Theater, Santa Cruz as well as short-listed for play festivals around the globe.
You can learn more about the world and works of Paola Bruni at paolabruniwriter.com.
Ken Weisner –
“how do you spell the sound of crickets is both full of life and deeply moving. You will be won over by the voices of Jory Post and Paola Bruni, in earnest dialogue. But it’s what they each do with poetry that will stay with you. They “make it new.” They invent it once more in one of its earliest forms: as a healing art.”
Ken Weisner, author of Anything on Earth and Cricket to Star
Dorianne Laux –
“This compelling collection of epistolary exchanges invites us into a relationship two poets have formed as one is slowly dying of cancer. So begins a conversation that becomes necessary to both. With Neruda as a guide they gather in the emptiness around them with the open living hands of friendship and poetry.”
Dorianne Laux, Pulizer Prize Nominee and author of Only As the Day is Long
Frank Paino –
“In this brief epistolary collection, poets Paola Bruni and Jory Post confront mortality. Whether through humor, deep reflection, shared grief, or the sometimes-uneasy bond of those who contemplate our finitude, these poets offer a bold fiat that fully embraces both the blessing and the curse of inhabiting a human body.”
Frank Paino, author of Obscura
Gary Young –
“Poets Paola Bruni and Jory Post created a book both rapturous and melancholy, a monument to the creative urge, to poetry, and to the music of two voices singing in harmony. Their poems speak with great affection and candor, and carry the reader along on their intimate, revealing journey.”
Gary Young, author of No Other Life
David Allen Sullivan –
“In this astonishing, co-authored book, how do you spell the sound of crickets, words trigger words. Here we encounter: ‘Paola and Jory. The brightness. The reflections. That which is out of our control.’ These lines by Jory Post sum up the exploratory, brave, and playful wordsmithery. We’re swept along by imagination, though the specter of Jory’s approaching death colors the scintillating game. This is not a book of goodbyes, but hellos to all that’s unknown, to all that we’re given to know, and it revels in how much familiar strangers can open us to other worlds, even if we have to leave this one.”
David Allen Sullivan, author of Black Butterflies Over Baghdad