Lo (formerly Laurie) Galluccio spent her childhood spellbound to her father Tony's talk of a great invention. An Italian immigrant and Harvard scholar-athlete in the 1940's, his untimely death in 1979 when Lo was 15, darkened her life and drove her to become an artist. She graduated from a big urban high school, C.R.L.S., and then went on to a full-scholarship at Harvard College herself in 1981. A Social Studies concentrator, she spent most of her time studying modern poetry, taking modern and African dance classes and acting in Mainstage and Experimental Theatre Productions, directed by friends Ben Evett (ART, Actor's Shakespeare Project), Eric Ronis and Patrick Bradford. By her senior year she performed as Katherine in the American Repertory Theatre's production of Love's Labor's Lost. She went on to study as an MFA candidate at the Theatre School at DePaul (formerly the Goodman School of Drama.) Boyfriend Adam Gorgoni followed her to Chicago when he graduated and they stayed together through her tour of the South with Chamber Theatre Productions and his apprenticeship to his father, Al Gorgoni, at Lightstream Studio in New York City.
As they parted in 1990, Lo and Adam recorded two songs she'd written, "Howl at the Moon" and "Strange Daughter." From there an internship at the Alley Theatre in Houston, TX, where she was nominated for a Princess Grace Fellowship, and a stint as a chorus girl in a Gothic musical in Sarasota Florida, led her back to writing. While living in Brooklyn and teaching public night high school, she had penned a collection (unpublished) called, Not For Amnesia. Her second work was a 40 page prose poem called, Sarasota VII which she wrote on and off for several years in New York while subletting through the Equity callboard. Following a tour of Greece with a LaMama company, she decided she wanted to become a vocal artist and was influenced heavily by Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega and Patti Smith. After a romantic and artistic alliance with Dave Tronzo, she made a solo CD on the now defunct Knitting Factory label called, Being Visited. It was released in 1997, after Galluccio spent a few weeks in Cambridge Hospital under psychiatric care for voices she maintained were supernatural and psychic in origin.
In 1993, she had produced a second collection of poetry, Hot Rain which was edited by poet-mentor Lawrence Joseph. Roy Nathanson of the Jazz Passengers liked the collection so much, he offered her a professional job co-writing with the him for their In Love CD on Windham Hill/High Street. Hot Rain was finally published as a chapbook, by Singing Bone Press (an imprint of Ibbetson St.) in 2004, after she'd moved back to Boston. In 2003, Galluccio self-released Spell on You to the critical acclaim of the Northeast Performer and the Boston Girl Guide.
Since that time, she's had poetry and prose published in Out of the Blue Writer's Unite, Night magazine, I am from the Lower East Side, Heat City Literary Review, Ibbetson St. magazine, Abramelin magazine, the Wilderness House Literary Review and others. Since 2005, she's served as the poetry editor of the Cambridge Alewife and has reviewed many poetry books for Ibbetson St. Press, including works by Hugh Fox (Blood Cocoon, Way Way off the Road,) Lyn Lifshin (The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian), Richard Cambridge (Pulsa, a book of books), Peg Lauber, (The New Orleans Suite), and John Freeman (In the Place of Singing) to name a few.
Lo has performed extensively in Boston and New York, at music clubs and poetry venues, most recently in 2000 with a project called "Leda's sWan" which played at St. Mark's Poetry Project, a Plexus Human Rights Benefit, and at Mo Pitkins in the East Village. She will be recording a new CD with Will DiMartino in the spring of 2007, called, Dream of Life.
Two of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes: "Millennium", published in Ibbetson St. 20, and "What I really Want" re-published by Abramelin magazine in 2006.
She's also working on a dramatic memoir about her voices to be performed at Club Passim in August of 2007.
In January 2006 Sergio Manghina published a piece on Lo in New Magazine, an Italian journal called, Parole Dietro lo Specchio.
Hugh Fox, in Circle magazine reviewed "Spell on You" in 2005.
Vin Scelsa, of WNEW radio, reviewed Being Visited and called it "By turns, mysterious, seductive, surreal and spacey."
Lo would like to dedicate this bio to "Queen of Mars" her first pop anthem dedicated to her father Tony and also her alter-ego, which she became in New York in pink wig and silver shoes, guided by voices.
MILLENNIUM You walk in and it's just like the millennium. In my dream he said. So far away in life. Married now he's dusted off the bits of our romantic strife. But as sure as I'm still reeling, as the snow is white. New York's drifts are lousy grey and the millennium's my wife. To a cold room you'd visit me all crucified. Make me come you'd sigh. Closing your eyes. The Magdalene would open up her thighs. His blackouts were my wine. As long as I stay sober, The rain may clear my sight. Babylon is my redemption And the millennium's my wife. A straight girl once I saw my father fade and die. My great God was dead. Not like Nietzsche meant. In our strange love he rose up from the deep, Where he and I would meet. And as long as I'm still haunted, As the ghosts are rife - we know that bridges burn us And the millennium's my wife. Lolita has her melodrama you would scoff. She sobs to get off. Humbert Humbert's hot. In your suburban house I couldn't breathe. The middle class does bleed. As long as I'm still running It cuts me like a knife. Here's to your second coming. The millennium's my wife. To a hotel of achievement we had come to get our wings. I learned how to drown. It taught me many things. I still dive for faces in the waves. Trophies of us lost, And trophies of us saved. And though it left us stranded, We both used dark for flight. In dream, I may have landed, The millennium's my wife. A spring like this I guess it was some years ago. There were no tulips, but a pale volcanic snow. We'd made it through the gauntlet and our hearts were stuck below. But as the castle marked us, and as the day was night, In Oz I'm ressurecting, and the millennium, the millennium, The millennium's my wife. 1993, New York City Look at the Whales I say and she peels apart The pomegranate. A God’s head got locked In the canal of a Goddess. The child is this fruit, Dead and sweet to eat. Mostly teeth. Sweet, red. What trick turned the teeth perfect and abundant? It’s never enough...each tiny plucked tooth for the miracle fruit she is reveling...to hold my attention from the sorrow and lust I have for the whales. Look at the whales. The ocean breaks cresting. And the whales, the whales lumber cold in their darkness, the magnification of a mystery. Strange moans and lumbering. Rolling under waves. Their blubber will light lamps. Words are flecked in the thick smooth turning of whales. When we make love he says, "It's like two mammals" Loving the sea. Tumbling salt tunnels. Giving birth everytime to nothing but a wild sorrow. It is a joy, plummeting Yielding sometimes, a light. Then I see her hands, tapered, quick tearing the pomegranate. I remember the earth and I cry. There is a brown field with red carnations. I’m a horse again. Published in the, Bagels with the Bards Anthology No, 2 VIRTUE'S TONGUE You left me filled with kisses. I do not cry and that is good. A dry face shines in other directions. Leaves its ghost under the hood. Bright corn and lentil soup is the feast of a Pilgrim's heat. Puritans love in the glow of shame. Love in threes to give it a name. You two form the pyramids base and I am the point you raise. Winter's shy, suffusing smoke before she banks her blaze. When ice thaws in December pleasure turns whole in the rain. Evil, perhaps, is formless, a fragment. But a mythical drain. Virtue stanches the thirst of drowning; it is fierce and warm. As my hands are hushed in your arm's pit, as my chills that way swarm. The spirit waltzes its tango. The heart pounds in every mask. Desire burns to ashes of wisdom. That is passion's task. We who have been cold and blind convert to sighs and grace. Our ashes, like tiny grey birds, flown from place to place. Lick me hard with your fluttering tongue, make my beauty rise. That is the way of cats, the fire in glittering green eyes. Published in Hot Rain, 2004 by Ibbetson St. Press
For more information on Lo Galluccio visit: http://unofficiallogalluccio.atspace.com