After Making Love to Lord Byron on the Morning of My Thirty-seventh Birthday by Amy Nawrocki

We’re celebrating April—National Poetry Month—with the release of Nawrocki’s latest collection Reconnaissance. In her latest collection, Amy Nawrocki plays voyeur and thief, surveying canvases and investigating bookshelves, searching for creativity’s origins and exploring the nature of inspiration. The poems in Reconnaissance uncover muses between the frayed pages of Byron and Shelley, in Chagall’s stained glass, at Oscar Wilde’s grave, past the deep bogs of Glencoe, and in the far away snow caps of Mount Fuji. In these insightful and elegant poems, Nawrocki invites us to believe in “the authenticity of first sight.” Open the paint box and learn how to stare.

Look for Reconnaissance April 7, 2015 in paperback and ebook, on Amazon, B&N, Kindle, Nook, and Kobo or ask for it in your local indie bookstore. In the meantime, enjoy a selection.

After Making Love to Lord Byron
on the Morning of My Thirty-seventh Birthday

He left me once the broken blue
of dawn came through the window,
at the instant when night and day
drew apart. But like all heroes
with sable hair and burnt eyes, darkness
eclipses the rose of soft lips, and a kiss,

well, no woman can expect such a goodbye,
not even on her birthday. The kitchen hisses
with the hot hiccup of animal flesh
burning on the stove. I finish coffee
and fill my belly with warm toast, wait to end
the day with wine. There are no candles today.

As I write another year, the brooding exile
in my bed slumbers in a claret robe forever
in the fever of thirty six. We’ll go no more
a-roving, except to the phantom hearth where he
will wait for me. The ink of my pen
burns into the woven fibers of a sheet.

Amy Nawrocki is a Connecticut native, raised in Newtown and now living in Hamden. She earned a Bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College and a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Arkansas. She has received numerous honors for her poetry, including awards from the Litchfield Review Poetry Contest, the Codhill Chapbook Competition, The Loft Anthology, Phi Kappa Phi, New Millennium Writings, and the Connecticut Poetry Society. Finishing Line Press published her three chapbooks: Potato Eaters, Nomad’s End, and Lune de Miel. With her husband, Eric D. Lehman, she wrote A History of Connecticut Wine, A History of Connecticut Food and A Literary History of Connecticut. She teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Bridgeport and is mother to two cats, Maple and Django.

Reconnaissance

Poems by Amy Nawrocki
ISBN: 978-1-938846-69-4 | 6×9 | 100pgs
Pre-Order Now | List Price: $14.95