Andrew Squitiro's debut prose collection,
LOCAL WEATHER
(
Dynamo Verlag; 94pp; paperback; 6 February 2024) is a collection of sixteen tight dispatches as intense as they are concise. Set amid the weeping willows and Spanish moss of New Orleans, a city where climate change is felt punishingly, these essays unflinchingly explore human alienation, the human yearning for connection and love amid the twin existential horrors of climate change and the COVID pandemic.
Michael Alessi, author of
Call a Body Home
, said of
: "How do you build a life in the face of what feels like the end of the world? Squitiro's meditative collection charts the weather of our current climate, bearing witness to the phenomena and anxieties of finding intimacy, connection, and an impermanent place in the shadow of impending catastrophe. These essays tenderly illuminate the middle ground, the hours we fill with other people and things, the literary equivalent of a flashlight proffered from a lover's bugout bag to help us weather the way forward."
Geoff Watkinson, editor of
Green Briar Review
, said: "
is marvelously approachable, piercing the thin membrane of individual and collective yearning... Squitiro circles love, loss, identity, and change like the hurricanes and storms of New Orleans."
Andrew Squitiro is the author of several chapbooks of poetry from Gaggle Books. He holds a MFA in creative writing from Old Dominion University and his work has appeared in numerous journals. He lives in New Orleans.