Camille Norton

http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=oid%3A200726

My review of CORRUPTION: POEMS:

In “Napoleon’s Boots and Dante’s Body,” the conquering general tastes victory in Italy: “There’s nothing like antiquity / to make you hungry for the treasures of a tomb. // Ah, what a tomb was Italy …. // all beautifully elided like layers of pastry in a papal cannoli.” And later, “This is so good I must eat the whole thing, said Napoleon.” Like many of those in Camille Norton’s award-winning collection, Corruption, this poem is both intensely literary and fully engrossed in the flesh. Her gift, it seems, is to take ekphrasis--familiar to fans of the eponymous Sacramento-based journal as poems that take a work of art as their point of departure--beyond the merely descriptive, into a merger of the personal and the historical.… (más)