Fireball
Larry Kearney
ISBN 978-1-956005-26-4 220 pages $20.00
“I didn’t know much about the Consiglia family. I knew Tony lived in a big house down on Colonial Road cause I kind of knew his daughter. I knew who his sister was, too, and I figured his father lived next door to him because the mailbox on that house said Consiglia too and I’d seen the guy who lived there. He was pretty old.”
Jim, Carole and David engage in teenage clandestine romantic and erotic adventures, plotting and executing revenge against dangerous adults who have done them harm and physically threaten their lives. The novel grips us in a dark delight as they become the people they will become, and, in turn, perhaps have us trace back to the fruition of our own forgotten history. Fireball tells a tale of the immensity of children’s lives, those they live out in secret, far from the reach of adult supervision and awareness.
The Bay Ridge Novels of Larry Kearney weave their intensely enjoyable readability through a nostalgia premised in ’50s early ‘60s New York re-encountering the existentialism and rawness of perennial youth. As in his influential and much-lauded poetry, Kearney maintains an imaginative correspondence to his early citizenry, carried through fire and crime, straight forward out of the old American century. These unforgettably thrilling tales of precocious young lives thrown to their overlapping fates animate as yet untested characters—surprisingly adaptable and resilient—and anxiously pits them against the foreshadows of cosmopolitan struggle, the brutal claims of fallen obsession, last-gasp redemption, and ultimately, the possibility and poignancy of collective forgiveness.
Larry Kearney was Born in Brooklyn, New York. He moved to San Francisco in ’64 and became involved with the group of poets centered around North Beach and generally and inaccurately described as the San Francisco Renaissance—Spicer, MacInnis, Duerden, Duncan, Brautigan, Stanley, Blaser, Kyger, Meltzer, Hirschman et al. His closest friends in poetry were Jack Spicer and Richard Duerden, and Spicer’s insistence on being willing to, and capable of, saying what the poem wants to say when it wants to say it, endures for him as a working definition—poetry as the whole of the real—the seen and unseen, heard and unheard—the voices of the haunted living and the unsuccessfully dead. He currently lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Mouron-sur-Yonne, France.
