The Needle Has Landed by Alicia Caldanaro

“The Needle Has Landed is Alicia Caldanaro at her most original—conversational and plainspoken but jazzy and full of improvisation and wit. The poems remind me of Frank O’Hara’s poems (both in terms of voice and the pop-culture subject matter) but The Needle Has Landed comes to us from the Midwest instead of New York City. Still, like O’Hara, Caldanaro’s poems work as celebrations of pop culture even though the poems also deal with anxieties and the haunting mysteries of the past. The poems in The Needle Has Landed are wistful and full of yearning, but also charm the reader, as the poet is able to take the commonplace and turn it into a kind of casual sublime. In poems about MacGyver, Sylvia Plath, Judy Garland and Peanuts (among many others), Caldanaro fuses laughter with a recognition that what is past is, indeed, past (there is a sense of elegy to them). And yet the poems brim with hopefulness and appreciation. I recognize this world Caldanaro describes in The Needle Has Landed and for many readers it will feel like going home again.”

–David Dodd Lee, author of Orphan, Indiana