Amy Nawrocki
poet and educator
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Amy Nawrocki
poet and educator
Mouthbrooders
During six months of vocal cord paralysis, author and professor Amy Nawrocki turned to the written word and fell in love with language again. The result of this exploration is her stunning collection Mouthbrooders, full of sounds and their echoes—ravens screeching, eggs cracking, and acorns falling. As Nawrocki struggles to find her own voice again, she midwives the voices of catastrophe, of memory, and of the small miracles of everyday life.
Where does language originate, especially the language of poetry―in the brain or the emotions? In the images we behold, or in the memory? In this deeply observant collection, Amy Nawrocki asks, “What language do you have / for the barren days when nothing catches your eye?” And although “The contortionist is unable to speak / from all her sword swallowing,” Nawrocki whose brain and emotions once survived a near-fatal illness, is able to be, in beautiful language, an eyewitness―not only to her own inner life but also to what is fragile and transient in all our lives. This poet knows how illness and fear can seep into the everyday. And it is exactly this awareness that breathes life into every word of Mouthbrooders.
Cortney Davis, author of Taking Care of Time
With language that freshens and lends intrigue to the familiar, Amy Nawrocki makes a sacrament of life’s ordinary rituals from gardening to shoveling snow to waiting at the DMV. Whether it’s a walk in the woods, a meal, or the travails of illness, readers are in the moment with her. I delight in worlds with “lollipops that suck away loneliness,” where a woman is “foraging for her lover’s shoulder,” and there’s a “taxidermy of goodbyes.” I want to linger and read again.
David K. Leff, author of The Breach and Terranexus.
Amy Nawrocki’s new collection Mouthbrooders is precise and carefully contained. Each poem is a vessel crafted to express one perfect thing: how saliva works on a burn; the tender terror of bringing a word or a child into life; the pleasure of “rigatoni…heavy/ with artichokes, cream sauce,/peppercorns slowly braised/and crushed under a fork”; the desire to “sample” one’s own flesh; a conversation with a peregrine in which the persona asks, “Tell me about the wind, the kind/that quiets fear and lengthens your cries/ into inaudible whispers.” Mouthbrooders is a collection to savor.
Laurel S. Peterson, Norwalk Community College, Poet Laureate, Norwalk, CT 2016 – 2019
The Comet’s Tail
Available April 10, 2018
I do not remember the tubes, the tests, or the icy cold of space.
I do not remember losing six months of my life.
At age nineteen, Amy Nawrocki returned from her first year of college, scribbled a few notes in her journal, and took a terrifying summer trip. She remembers one night of disorientation, then nothing until Christmas, when awareness slowly restarts. The Comet’s Tail is the story of these missing months: the seizures and fever spikes, the deep nothing of coma, and the unexpected, dramatic recovery. Memory is recreated around EEG transcripts and doctors’ notes, family vigils and blurry Polaroids. From her unique perspective, Nawrocki investigates the connections between memory, trauma, and identity. She illuminates what it means to truly return to consciousness in this extraordinary memoir of illness, healing, and writing over the blank pages of our lives.
Praise for The Comet’s Tail
“In this small book . . . Nawrocki attempts to reconstruct what happened before, during, and after this coma, and in the process, she’s written a meditation about the mysteries of memory itself. –Vivian Wagner, New Pages
“A complex and compelling memoir.” –Kirkus Reviews
“From the first sentence of her elegant and strikingly poetic memoir, Nawrocki creates a palimpsest scrapping layers to reveal glimpses of her ‘summer of no memory.’ In The Comet’s Tail, Nawrocki delves through medical records, journals, and family stories to pose the question ‘does memory protect us from trauma or does trauma erase memory?’ Hers is a singularly courageous and fascinating journey in search of the answer.”
–Bessy Reyna, author of Memoir of the Unfaithful Lover
“Circling around a span of months erased by a serious illness, Nawrocki has crafted a stunning meditation on the nature of the self and memory. The power of the crafted sentence and examined, interrupted life in these pages will leave an indelible impression.”
–Sonya Huber, author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys
“The Comet’s Tale is the fascinating exploration of how memory, or its absence, fits between body and spirit. Amy Nawrocki takes us on a journey through piecing together the fragments that make up one period of her life and in doing so opens the door to reflection on what makes a memory, inviting us to ponder the uncertainties and questions that come together to make up a life: why we remember some things, forget others, and how our own story of memory impacts those with whom we share this life. Her story is a reminder that even when we try really hard to make sense of what happens, so much of life remains a mystery. Prepare to ride an unsettling yet beautiful current with the author, moving on a riptide of forgetting and confusion, down into the murky depths of nothingness, to suddenly emerge on the other side of awareness with a gasp, ready to fill the next blank page with whatever comes next.”
–Heidi Barr, author of Woodland Manitou: To Be on Earth
“Amy Nawrocki asks “How can I write a memoir about events for which I have no memory?” And then she proceeds to do just that in The Comet’s Tail. Her poet’s voice fills in the gaps of the six months she was lost to the effects of a brain infection. As a nurse, I’m moved by this glimpse into a patient’s experience; everyone caring for people with traumatic brain injury should read it. As I writer, I marvel at Nawrocki’s skill and elegance portraying the grief and grace, the mystery and the miraculousness, and yes, the hope and humor in waking up.”
–Iris Graville, author of Hiking Naked: A Quaker Woman’s Search for Balance
“Amy Nawrocki’s The Comet’s Tail is a story of the empty space in a life, a time defined, paradoxically, not by memories but by forgetting. It is a beautifully written piece of soulful and jarringly honest reflection about her struggle to recover from a debilitating condition that left her unable to care for her self. The Comet’s Tail calls on us to ask ourselves: Is it only our conscious memory that makes us who we are? Who are we when we emerge on the other side of such an episode? How does one piece together oneself in its aftermath? Nawrocki’s experience is nothing short of a shamanic journey, a rite of passage, in which she emerges with profound insights—insights that come not from her memories but from the emptiness of this forgotten time. We are lucky to be able to hear her wisdom from the other side.”
–Theodore Richards, author of The Great Re-Imagining: Spirituality in an Age of Apocalypse
Four Blue Eggs
Praise for Amy Nawrocki’s Four Blue Eggs
From poet Leslie McGrath:
Amy Nawrocki’s poems celebrate preservation and renewal in New England landscapes. Births, deaths, and the whimsical appearance of the mysterious—all are welcomed as the poet invites us to “light the light that will unblind us.” Nawrocki is a deft observer of the beauty of work, be it pickling or pulling a quahog from the muck. The weathered and the wasting, too, are treated with wonder by this poet who describes a bygone farm in which pumpkins in a field are “sitting like children watching a magic show.”
From Lisa Schwartz, Poetry Editor of the Newtowner Magazine:
Like Whitman, Amy Nawrocki gracefully extols the beauty of nature while subtly lamenting our detachment from it. Her elegant writing lends transcendence to our everyday world: a fiddlehead fern “emerges from the clean violin of time;” ritual becomes the light that “unblinds us;” a spinning wheel evokes the threads of destiny. Whether she is writing about swamp cypresses or kitchen sinks, Ms. Nawrocki’s poetry has a quiet intimacy that sings with harmonic magic.
From poet Vivian Shipley:
As if she were a weaver at her loom creating a tapestry of Four Blue Eggs, Amy Nawrocki threads the death of her mother into poems that navigate the tension inherent between the heart and mind created by “the mind’s insufficient wiring.” Written with a lyrical but unsentimental voice, Nawrocki crisscrosses generations by describing tactile memories like peeling parsnips during January while “iglooed” from the cold. Each poem is underpinned with the tenderness Nawrocki displays in a powerful poem, “Threads,” where she keeps the cat from waking her mother while she is choosing a dress for her cremation.
Always sensitive to the natural world, Nawrocki fears raccoons will encounter “tumult of oncoming tires.” What other poet has worried about the cypress that was felled to make red mulch for her azalea? In her struggle to navigate the world and cherish its beauty, in a particularly vivid poem about bees, she observes “What lasts is not the sting….what lasts is the internal honey.” Ultimately, teaching us to “flame into the now,” Four Blue Eggs ignites a candle that the heart and mind can follow.
Four Blue Eggs was a Finalist for the 2013 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize
Released February 7, 2014 by Homebound Publications. Second Edition was released in 2017 (with new cover)
Amy Nawrocki 