The Punishment Book The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 4 by Tony Trigilio

The intertwined dramas (in the highest sense) of action and artifice, soap opera and memory, the empty coffins of Dark Shadows and the crowded space of the poet’s marriage—The Punishment Book is a radical act of attention that creates its own liminal space where these blur and blend into tripped-out paisley pastiche. “What kind of separation is this—what kind of love is this—” the poet asks: less a question than an invitation to notice, truly notice, everything going on within the tissue-thin walls of our own apartments and relationships, the “ekphrastic vampire soap poem” of our lived, living, and un-dead experience.

—Jan Bottiglieri 

Tony Trigilio’s epic ongoing project of investigating personal and cultural touchstones through the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows has reached Book Four, and Episode 696, but if you’re new to the project, don’t worry, this is an excellent place to start. It begins with a great unravelling, of Trigilio’s marriage in the present day, and Dark Shadows in 1967-69 as the country was in turmoil, culminating in the Manson family killings. Among the explorations is what it means to take the self apart, to exhibit it, while trying desperately to hold a marriage together, aware also “how tempting to lure my nerves into a funerary box with burning clumps of potpourri, then bury my feelings in cement.” It’s a book of beginnings and endings, hovering over the question “why continue?” so that, in answering that question, Book 4 becomes a Book 1 in an alternate system. Fittingly, it’s a book of prose, prose-poetry, and poetry that moves in and out of prosody. It might be true that all is flux, but this collection is held together by Trigilio’s conversational, searching voice, aware equally of the possibilities and dangers of its presence, in his obsessive, matter-of-fact delivery. It’s a tour de force.

—John Gallaher 

I had a blast swerving through this preposterous Proustian epic of poly-simultaneity. Tony Trigilio uptwists his cheezy, tee-vee subject—goth daytime soap Dark Shadows—into epiphanies of love and loss, but also fashion and history. In its own weird, OCD way, The Punishment Book vampires time itself beyond the boundaries of the undead.

—Jack Skelley

Tony Trigilio’s recent books are Craft: A Memoir (Marsh Hawk Press); Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the 2020 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize; and Ghosts of the Upper Floor (BlazeVOX [books]), the third volume of TheComplete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood). His books of poetry also include Inside the Walls of My Own House (BlazeVOX),White Noise (Apostrophe Books), and Historic Diary (BlazeVOX), among others. A volume of his selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published by Guatemala’s Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). Trigilio co-founded the poetry journalCourt Green in 2004, and is poetry editor of Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose. He lives in Chicago.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 256 pages


· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-473-4

$22