emily thornton calvo

Best Reviews Ever

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In a school: "This was really good. I brought my phone in here thinking I'd use it the whole time, but I didn't look at it once!"    - Jason, High School Student

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In a bookstore:"...sadly, poetry events are often our least well-attended. So, you can imagine my delight and surprise when our reading with Emily Calvo and Andy Karol drew a crowd of more than forty people! Their work deserves audiences of this size and even larger. Every one of us was enthralled by their multimedia presentation, featuring both visual and musical accompaniment. Crackling with energy, their deeply personal writing combined with their stage presence is fiercely engaging."

      — Sarah Hollenbeck,

                Co-owner Women & Children First
 

In a library:  Calvo’s poems and paintings span from topics deeply personal and profound to ones light and humorous, moving seamlessly from smiling, frivolous observation, to wincing memories of family and painful personal crises.  Her first poem, for example, is called “Hunting Down Dinner on Highway 13,” a light-hearted recollection of dinner at a Missouri café called the Beefmaster.  After speculating cheerfully that the restaurant’s patriarch—presumably the Beefmaster himself—has “a past as checkered as the tablecloths,” she turns her eye on the rest of the diner’s supporting cast: Mrs. Beefmaster, Junior Beefmaster, and the ever-attendant swarms of flies making the rounds of the tables.  Ever insightful and good-natured, Calvo’s eye transforms a decidedly prosaic event and setting into an engaging character study and contemplation on the universal experience—part awkwardness and part adventure, part drudgery and part curiosity—of traveling the countryside.   --2017