Book Event w/ GABRIELLE RILLEAU

REVIEWS

In Gabrielle Rilleau’s new book of poems, No Room for Slippage, Provincetown is the home to which “you forever return/to forget/ and to remember,” and in her telling it is indeed memorable territory, located somewhere between Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Wilder’s Our Town. Time shifts seamlessly, the past and the present morphing into one long tale with many vivid variations. Rilleau is a docent of memory, leading the fascinated reader through a gallery of deeply affectionate portraits from a place and a time that add up to more than mere nostalgia. You can call it memoir, if you want, or local history. I call it love.
~Tom Centolella, author of Almost Human

No Room for Slippage, Gabrielle Rilleau’s moving poetic memoir of growing up in Provincetown, Massachusetts is both an intimate family saga and a loving album of reflections on the remarkable men and women who made up the extended family of Provincetown itself. In this exquisite portrait of place, Gaby Rilleau has also immersed us in the flavor of an historical and artistic moment in the world that still holds for her – and which she shares with us – those consolations of growing up so deeply rooted in the home place of one’s past. For Gaby Rilleau, these pages become a delicate hymnal of thanks and praise.
~David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour

GABRIELLE RILLEAU, daughter of artist and leather crafters, grew up in Provincetown, Massachusetts during the 1940’s and 50’s, It was a time when its fishing fleet was thriving, artists were struggling, and voices of children’s play sang from every corner in town. It was a time when the town had its own electric power plant and the interdependence and independence of the dwellers fashioned the core of life. A time when clocks ran slower, giving time for net mending and storytelling…the spinning of yarns. Summer people from over the bridge and beyond were a source of curiosity, entertainment and additional livelihood. The mix formed an ever-changing dance of the town’s demography with colorful choreography.