The Poems of Peter Caccavari
Photo Credit: Jeff Carson.
Peter Caccavari’s first chapbook of poetry, Minor Loss of Fidelity, coming soon from Finishing Line Press, depicts people reacting to their environment – whether natural or human-made – and their struggles to make sense of those encounters. The poems chronicle a variety of losses, but also a variety of hard-won gains. These encounters with the environment are mirrored in encounters of content with poetic forms. Personal history, natural history, and poetic history undergird the present, and these gird the present for the future. (Source: Finishing Line Press)
Poet Tyrone Williams calls the chapbook “a testament to resisting despair, how to live with, how to come to love, loss of life, the losses of the body. In these poems, there is comfort in the every day, and more importantly, in the natural world where there are always reminders, always remainders, of what has almost—but not quite—disappeared.”
Alan Michael Parker, another poet, says this: “Sweet and elegant, wry and inquisitive, the poems of Peter Caccavari prove formally rigorous and informally dazzling. Whether writing about the cosmos or the supermarket, COVID-19 or Jupiter, Caccavari offers us solace lined with skepticism—or maybe skepticism lined with solace?—our lives together in this earth-bound moment his deepest subject. In a crown of sonnets, terza rima, a villanelle, and buckets full of free verse, Minor Loss of Fidelity makes us all better, not a curative but a reckoning.”
Caccavari wears two hats. By day, he is the Associate Vice President for Institutional Effectiveness and Title IX Coordinator for Union Institute & University. His job requires compliance and attention to detail. “I enjoy that job very much – it’s where I can satisfy my desire for order. By night, his creative side emerges. “Poetry, on the other hand, lets me color outside the lines and break the rules.”
His poetry has appeared in many publications including Connecticut River Review, Ruminate, Dappled Things, Free State Review, The Louisville Review, and Cathexis Northwest. In addition, he has presented at and written for a number of academic venues. Caccavari earned his bachelor of arts in English from Xavier University and his Ph.D. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University. He lives in Cincinnati and credits the beauty of the landscape and city as inspiration.
One of his sisters asked him “What is a poem?” when they were younger. When asked now his answer is the same as it was then. “The most fundamental questions are always the best. I didn’t have an answer for her then, and I don’t have an answer for her now. The best approach may be to work backward from that question (maybe every question). Not answer it. Because the minute you square it off, you want to round it. Once you’ve got Euclid, then non-Euclid comes along, asking different questions. So poetry for me is in part getting to the source of the question.”
To learn more about Dr. Caccavari and his poetry, visit petercaccavari.com. Eager to read his poems? You can preorder the book.
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