Published Work
The Casanova Chronicles
In this book of voices, speakers resurrected from the deeper past and the dead chafe against the circumstances of love, sex, loss, and longing.
The Casanova Chronicles was a finalist for the 2011 Ohioana Book Book Award in Poetry.
Letter to Sister Maria Concetta from Casanova
Paris, 2 July, 1750
each time I read it. What has changed you so?
Can you not see, my love, that bitterness wicks
more than blood from your heart? When you forgo
me, and repudiate the intimacies you and I
and your sister shared, what is left but regret
for the appetites of the flesh? Till the day I die
I will think of you both as my little wives, my debt
to you impossible to repay except by placing
your needs before mine. Thus, I will not see you
again, nor will I speak with Nanetta. . . . The ring
you gave me is herewith enclosed. As evening blues
and my candle gutters, I conjure us up, I crave
us—three virginal shades both happy and grave.
Excerpt from a Review of THe Casanova Chronicles
“This is the third book by Myrna Stone, from Greenville, Ohio, who is emerging as a powerful new voice in contemporary poetry. She reveals a vast, rich vocabulary and, especially in this book, a fluent command of various forms, from the sonnet to the triolet to the sestina. As George Bilgere suggests in a quotation on the cover of the book, this is a ‘wild, sexy, exuberantly off-the-wall collection’ in which ‘parrots, puppets, and the great Casanova take turns force-feeding Viagra to the stuffy old sonnet. But it’s Myrna Stone’s Rabelaisian gift for language that really steals the show.”
It is quite a show and, yes, she steals it again and again.”
-David Lee Garrison, Rattle, April 30, 2011 (Full Review)
Praise for The Casanova Chronicles
“Sonnets spoken by parrots? Couplets rhymed by a ventriloquist’s dummy? A book of poems like no other, wonderfully oddball yet technically impressive. The Casanova Chronicles offers more wonders than a cabinet of curiosities, more pleasures than a night of vaudeville. The legendary lover himself comes alive through voices spiked variously with sympathy, humor, and bile. That’s Myrna Stone’s gift: to lay bare the hearts that throb beneath feathers and flesh, and sometimes even wood.”
“These poems rant, chatter, cajole, prate, excoriate. Each is a busy bee, a chatterbox, a blabbermouth in which a husband talks so sexy to his wife that a waiter has to shut him up or an aged Casanova catalogues his bowed legs, his paunch, his loose flesh. Stone’s lines crackle with wit and insight and burst from the page like a dropped bottle of soda pop. Put this book in the other room when you go to bed tonight—it’s noisy!”