Cisterns of Multiplicity

Yvonne Kim invests in “The New Economy,” the latest poetry collection from Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

By Yvonne KimNovember 22, 2025

• Poetry

• Gender & Sexuality

TO PICK UP a book of poems today with the word “economy” in the title is unlikely to fill anyone with a sense of hope or relief. In 2025, the economy is trade wars, a housing shortage, the high price of a dozen eggs. If the topic were not divisive enough, Gabrielle Calvocoressi devotes the latter half of their latest collection, The New Economy, to religion, with a series of poems commemorating Lent. Calvocoressi may have long resisted being called a “uniquely American voice”—there is no such thing, they point out—but it’s hard to deny that few issues feel as fraught in the United States today as our neuroses about religion and the economy. Even so, they subvert these often politicized subjects with their characteristic curiosity, even humor. The resulting poems in The New Economy glimmer with exuberance and sensuality, turning otherwise tedious, clichéd concepts into fertile opportunities for connection with the modern environment.

The book begins with a whirlwind of personal and collective histories, as universal as deforestation and as specific as a meal of cold yam noodles. The first poem, “Hammond B-3 Organ Cistern,” is a celebration, of all the days “I don’t want to kill myself”:

All the people
in the streets waiting for their high fives
and leaping, I mean leaping
when they see me.

“Hallelujah!” the poem ends. But Calvocoressi’s jubilee is short-lived, as they start struggling to apply language to emotion: “Why don’t we talk about it? How good it feels.” Failing to “speak plainly,” in the following poems, Calvocoressi speaks to the trees and spirals on to larger crises, recalling how humanity abandoned its land and fellow animals: “How had we thought / we were divinity? That we deserved / everything.” It nauseates them.

Even so, Calvocoressi never loses sight of personal tragedy; scattered throughout this expansive first section are a series of “Miss you” poems dedicated to lost loved ones, grounding the collection in intimate and relational spaces. Meals with someone who would have understood and helped them “talk about it like it was so important.” Roasted tomatoes seasoned with pepper and nutmeg, a “puffy blue jacket”: “They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one / if you’ll only come by.”

The poems in the first section are anxious, overwhelmed by a litany of physical threats: bodily limitations, enclosed rooms, environmental destruction. But Calvocoressi’s closer inspection of these conditions yields musings that are more harmonious than disorienting; undergirding the unease is a remarkable groundedness, a commitment to a better world. In 2017, Calvocoressi talked to Jonathan Farmer for the Los Angeles Review of Books, where they are an editor at large, about the “democratic poem,” which evokes a world where all people can stand in and speak for one another. Following The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (2005) and Apocalyptic Swing (2009), their first two books, which contain various personas with individual voices, Calvocoressi explained the aim of their 2017 collection Rocket Fantastic: “I wanted to create something where those vessels, those figures, could sound both entirely like themselves and also like me—because they are me, and to say that they aren’t is not true.” The New Economy continues in this tradition, relentlessly hopeful about the democratic poem and its potential—for both the individual and society—to imagine possibilities for a “new economy.”

Never one to force a conclusion, Calvocoressi engages frankly with the confusion of existing in a body—with respect not only to gender but also to the experiences and obligations of living in a natural, decaying world. The collection sways between knowing and unknowing. Words for souls or bodies range from the abstract and spiritual (“light body,” “vessel,” “portals”) to the delightfully primal (“skin sack,” “skin house,” “your animal”). Boundaries between organisms and their environment are porous: “The trees and I open our mouths / together and become a different / kind of vessel.” Calvocoressi most frequently uses “cistern” to title their poems, but throughout the text, the term also references a person’s body, a lake, an eye or ear—each thing containing the potential to hold, or even become, some other thing. One poem begins, simply, “Slipping everywhere.” It’s ambiguous at first what exactly is slipping, but the poem’s title reveals six different possibilities for a subject: “Light Body Cistern Eyehole Pendulum Return.” Light shifts back and forth, encasing Calvocoressi like a halo, until, suddenly: “I was inside it, the nausea / became … luminous.” Time and space slip out of reach, as internal disorientation spills outward into their physical habitat: “At the market. At the table.”

Moments of clarity do arrive, often when Calvocoressi ends a poem by relaxing into a new paradigm, but the poems’ structural obscurities leave them open to changes of mind. In “My Perimenopausal Body Cistern Disappointing How Surprising,” Calvocoressi refers to their uterus as a “sad tenant”: 

One day the tenant turned
out to be my landlord. All day I wonder what
it means, clock I know as well as I know anything
but also never wanted. And also won’t give up.

The assigned roles are unclear in this transactional relationship. Is the poet the owner or a victim of their body? Line breaks amplify this effect: the image of a tenant that “turned”—pivoted, twisted—feels abruptly final and ambiguous, before it unravels into the transitive verb “turned out.” Yet the final lines suggest an alternative. The body is merely a “strange companion”: “This pillow that looked over me. Pillow / of skin and fat that […] tried its best. To cover me.” Observing the self from a distance, Calvocoressi rejects the pressure of finality and documents uncertainty and discomfort without condemnation.

Their resolutions aren’t always so resigned. Sometimes, Calvocoressi envisions radically different, ecstatic solutions outside reality. In one “Miss you” poem, they play basketball with a friend. “I’m the fiercest porcupine in the den. Pal, / let’s drink from bright fountains. Light drips / from our stubbly chins.” In one reading, the speaker is describing an imagined, ideal body; in another, they are literally more porcupine than human. The poem’s playfulness is reminiscent of Calvocoressi’s earlier speakers, who sometimes seem most joyful when not human. “Shave,” from Rocket Fantastic, exuded a similar confidence: “Like the buck I am I turn my head / side to side. […] Look how the doe comes ’round / and also the doves and also / the wolf who lets me pass.” Perhaps the wolf is simply letting them walk by, but it also gives them permission to pass, as something new: a buck, porcupine, animal.

It is not until “No Poems Today,” in the final section of Lent poems, that the word “economy” appears. There are no poems today, Calvocoressi writes, “because you’re here. There’s warm / bread to be eaten. With cheese and jam.” With a visiting friend, they pore over a seed catalog and imagine a world of bounty, a home with space for all the plants they want:

I can
still imagine years of possibility
ahead of us. A place with just a little
more space for us to stretch out.
A new economy and, yes, I know
I can’t drive at night. But who needs
to go anywhere in the future. Maybe
friends will come over. Imagine how
nice to hear nothing but the stars.

The new economy may be literal—some poems in the collection do acknowledge the allure of money and success—but, more often, this kind of abundance assumes an absence of wealth as a societal paradigm altogether. Economy not as an abstraction of production or consumption but as the commitment to do well with what one has, to practice care and providence—the pleasure in sitting down each day of Lent and making the most of writing a single poem. In “What brought me the most pleasure today?” readers can share in the speaker’s relief of “finally smell[ing] the onions” after a period of sickness and congestion. The poem splits this short moment into minutes, even seconds, and honors each pleasure. “The cat’s fur warming. This cup of tea waiting / as I work.” Calvocoressi’s thrifty syntax further embodies this attitude. In one poem, pondering humanity’s selfishness, they say more with silence than with language:

        How every being will slaughter 
        their neighbor if they’re hungry 
        and                    enough. 

Or, when they write about the need to “really know your animal,” Calvocoressi leaves room for the line to read as a declaration, a command to really know that you’re animal.

The New Economy celebrates this ambiguity. Words with their multiplicities do not confuse meaning but expand it, reflecting the slipperiness of identity. The collection’s final poems, in their relationship to religion, offer the most radical example of Calvocoressi’s ability to make language large enough to hold contradictions. The speaker thinks about Christ often and confesses, “I did when I was little too.” Indeed, their childlike awe and confusion turns Christ into one of the book’s most mysterious, whimsical, and even absurd images. Calvocoressi imagines the crucifixion, “the pain // of it, sure,” but beyond that, how “the sky might have looked” above, or the ground below: was it barren, or did some plants bloom? Then, a self-aware confession, simultaneously assured and timid: “I’m not / thinking of it like a poem or for // a poem. It’s not that kind of economy.” There is that word again, in the same line as the word “poem”: an economy that encourages honest curiosity, not wringing the world’s beauty for the sake of a poem but pursuing beauty and truth regardless.

“What would Jesus do,” Calvocoressi wonders with equal parts candor and irony. “Not a bumper / sticker,” they clarify. “A bodhisattva and young / man prone to anger as much / as he was prone to love. What would / that young man do?” What could be more democratic than this, a contemporary Christian decal opening itself up in The New Economy to a greater road of possibility? A scene of mercy, Jesus on the cross, achieving Buddhist nirvana, not as a god but as a young man, just another gendered vessel.