In honor of National Poetry month and the release (soon to be official–April 7) of Reconnaissance, Homebound Publications is offering signed copies of  Four Blue Eggs at a special sale price of $14.95. On your way to the bookstore, enjoy “About Four Blue Eggs” which appeared last year to promote the collection. Celebrate poetry, promote independent publishers, and make your purchases today.

About Four Blue Eggs

The poems in Four Blue Eggs reflect a wide span of time, poetically and literally. The earliest poem was “born” when I was an undergraduate; the most recent, a few months before I sorted through my files looking for poems that would fit together as a collection. Like me, the poems seem to be fascinated by time. Many poems mark milestones—birth, adolescence, schooling, growing older, dying. Some muse on time standing still, some trace the sun passing over the sky on a single day, some lament that it soon will run out. I find the passage of time—cosmic time, rock time—extraordinarily interesting. Humans are consumed by time in a different way, so I enjoy watching how trees and animals approach the world, seemingly unaffected except to acknowledge, now it is winter, now it is summer.

The philosophy of Homebound Publications aligns with what I try to do in my poems: contemplate, observe, and reflect. Tinker, tinker, tinker, write a little, tinker some more. Occasionally a poem comes about exactly as it happened, (like “These Hours”) but most of the time, poems ferment for a long time (like “Delta 88”). For me, that’s a good thing; like a sprout in a counter-top window, a fair amount of time, sun, and moonshine is needed before a poem makes its way into the world. I let the poem tell me where it wants to go. Often, it’s nowhere near where I expected. “The Mail Drop” needed a story, so I gave it one. “The Nautical Why” needed Adrienne Rich, so I found her.

When I look at the collection as a whole, I see life taking shape, born out of a petri dish, if you will, like the girl in the opening poem. A lot of things happen along the way. There is some philosophizing (“The World of Ideas”), some learning (“Community College”), some confusion (“Mechanics”), some love “Caesura”), some sadness (“Threads”). Sometimes seasons change, sometimes disasters ensue, sometimes you make it up the mountain, sometimes you don’t. Creatures are born and loved ones die. But the poems bring them back and help let them go. Time passes. After it all, if you are able to “carry yourself out of a burning building” then that is a remarkable thing for me as the writer.

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

Enter to win a free copy of Reconnaissance.

The giveaway is sponsored by Goodreads and Homebound Publications.

The Wayfarer Spring Edition | Pre-order Now!

The spring edition of The Wayfarer is now available to pre-order!

Feature Articles:

Building a Temple of the Heart by Perle Besserman
Doing, Not Doing by Jason Kirkey
Wild Silence by L.M. Browning
Feature Photographer: Ryan Upp
A Spirituality of Wildness by Theodore Richards
A Wayfarer: Award-winning Author Gunilla Norris
Feature Artist: Lynne Harkes
Reimagining the Possible: An Interview with Sandra Ingerman

Featuring the Poetry of Laurie Klein, Kael Moffat, Jeff Burt, Sean M. Conrey, Gloria Heffernan, Paige Simkins, Karina Lutz, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Leslie Schultz, Jeff DeBellis, Ann Sheils, Walker Abel, Amy Nawrocki, Matthew Haughton and Christopher Nye. Also featuring a preview of Seasons of Contemplation by L.M. Browning; the essay Mending Family Wounds by guest columnist Nora Caron; the essay Summer People by Gail Collins-Ranadive; Listening to Our Listening by Gary Whited; and The Return Journey: Book Reviews by Eric D. Lehman.

We offer approximately 60% of each issue free to the public on our website. If you find yourself inspired by what you read here and would like to enjoy a full issue, you can order the journal in print or e-edition.

Print Edition | 74pgs | 8.5 x 11 | Full Color

Visit Homebound Publication’s Shop to Pre-order»

Posted by Homebound Publications. Many thanks to Diane Donovan for her review.

Early praise from Midwest Book Review for Amy Nawrocki’s forthcoming collection, Reconnaissance: by Diane Donovan of Midwest Review.

“Poems inspired by other poems aren’t a rarity: indeed, they are a typical pleasure of poets; because to read others’ works is to become inspired to create your own. It’s been said that the majority of poetry readers are themselves poets. But Amy Nawrocki carries this thought to a higher level in giving voice to Reconnaissance: a mission to probe the influence and presence of other works and to drink deeply of their approaches with the idea of filling one’s writing soul with the inspirations of others.

“But, how to translate this tall drink of water into one’s own works? Ah, that’s where the beauty of Reconnaissance comes in; because like a good investigative mission, it’s all about discovery, translation, and (ultimately) crafting something new and different from the pursuit of this style of happiness.

“Many a good book opens with a map to its contents, pointing out its likely direction, and Reconnaissance‘s map is ‘Guided Tour’, which tells of a circular journey through the cobwebs of life and back again: “Memorize a few loose-leaf pages,/note important dates with precision. Mention/the children by name and explain the heritage…”

“One strength of the poetic structure Nawrocki chooses lies in its capture of these dates, times, moments, and most of all, these atmospheres. In such a world the poet becomes a chronicler of life as well as the poems of others: a process captured here and there by observational pieces about readers, subjects, and writers alike whose lives are more than a folio of interconnected words, however famous they might become: “On the reverse, the message that would escort/Shelley’s poems to an upstairs room where/a man had decided he no longer craved her smile:/lots and lots of love, she wrote in haste, crossing/t’s so that the ink missed their intersection, and/congratulations. His wife would have the child.”

“It’s not just about looking at poetry in book form, either: Reconnaissance investigates all kinds of poetic structure, all methods of delivery, all wellsprings of influence, and all facets of life’s intersections and investigations. Take, for example, a honeymooner’s opening of Paris like a flower: “The collection captures us:/pucker and blow of dizzying lips to trumpet/after trumpet, wet saxophone reeds; a slow trombone slithers and hands skim the wood torso/of an upright bass, leaving the bow behind/for the kinesthetics of the body.”

“Byron. Shelley. Paris. Nawrocki. Evocative image-trackers, succinct capturers of atmosphere, and now, in Reconnaissance, poets enjoying a series of interconnected lives and purposes. Drink deeply: this free verse wellspring is vivid and thought-provoking and quenches the thirst for inspiration.”

—Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review

Reconnaissance

Poems by Amy Nawrocki
ISBN: 978-1-938846-69-4 | 6×9 | 100pgs
| List Price: $16.95
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