Iris In - Poetry by Kryssa Schemmerling

Publication Date: August 15, 2016
Paperback, 60 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-26-7

Available from Small Press Distribution

When Kryssa Schemmerling was a child growing up in California, the boundaries between film and real life were truly blurred, personal history and Hollywood history bound inextricably together. Small wonder that the movies became a central part of her life.

The experience of watching her father watch Truffaut's Jules & Jim provides a glimpse into darker mysteries of family and future. 'Before Hollywood' even, from the earliest moments of film 'the world leaks in/like stray light' just as it does in life, when we least expect it. DeMille orders the set of his 1923 Ten Commandments destroyed and buried in the desert, art imitating life but also a quintessentially American act of erasing the past to make way for the future. The movies are a way of understanding ourselves and how we came to be. These poems are another way to that same end.

Schemmerling retains her childhood sense of wonder but joins it with an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema. The result is verse that catches the reader up in its own world, as mesmerizing as the images flickering on the screen in a darkened theatre. You can almost smell the popcorn.

Praise for Kryssa Schemmerling's Iris In:

"Confronting the lost worlds of moviedom, their perfumed history of glory and hokum, Kryssa Schemmerling has written a collection of poems that are astutely visual, haunting and insightful. We meet D.W. Griffith as he 'hunts/locations like buffalo/from a train window' and ride with the 'California Blonde' who is 'heroine of her own road/movie. . . .' In Francois Truffaut’s 'The Story of Adele H.' Victor Hugo's daughter 'wrapped in winter cape,/ragged, heavy drapes/of matted hair' fascinates us with her story of longing and obsession. Iris In is an exciting book, multi-layered and savvy. It deserves a large and enthusiastic audience."
—Colette Inez, author of Horseplay and The Luba Poems

"Iris In by filmmaker and poet Kryssa Schemmerling mines pathos and grandeur in and behind scenes of Chaplin, Truffaut, DeMille and other cinematic legends. She places her own childhood narratives alongside mythic back lots and forgotten close-ups — it’s Christmas in Los Angeles where Jesus' birth, the doomed Romanovs, Hollywood freeways, fairy tales, and photographs fuse in the author’s recollection of her own youthful confusion. Even distributing family ashes becomes cinematic: 'My/hands are ghosted/white with him. I sow my father/into his garden….' Memories, movies, and film history dissolve into each other, creating new tensions as they are projected frame by frame onto the page. In 'Camera Obscura' she asks the reader to 'Watch/the Pacific Ocean pour/through a pinhole/into a shallow bowl/of sunlight….' Schemmerling brings lost footage and faded images back to life in this unusual debut collection."
— Lynn McGee, author of Sober Cooking, Heirloom Bulldog and Bonanza

"Don't expect anything expected from this terrific first collection of poet/filmmaker Kryssa Schemmerling. Certainly not the usual biographical poetry:

'I was Dorothy refracted
from Kansas onto the cusp
of color.' ('Bio Pic')

'We held our breath
and floated like tiny William Holdens,
face down in the pool
deep end shaded by jacaranda
and gasoline trees, swamped
with drowned bees.' ('Children of the Canyon')

To link, without nostalgia, the literal and figurative landscapes of old California, photography, movies, America, nature, and the personal, demands Schemmerling's skill with two vocabularies: film and poetry. And what other book offers Robert Altman’s revisionist Western McCabe and Mrs. Miller alongside Ward Bond's last word in The Maltese Falcon? IRIS IN: 'an expanding circle of light.' "
— Estha Weiner, author of In the Weather of the World and Transfiguration Begins at Home

Kryssa Schemmerling’s poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal, other publications. She received her undergraduate degree from Boston University and an MFA in film from Columbia University. In addition to writing poetry, she is an award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter who has taught screenwriting at New York University and Montclair State University in New Jersey. Born and raised in California, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Iris In is her first book.