National Poetry Month
Head over to Homebound Publications for all you need for National Poetry Month, and get ready for Poem in Your Pocket Day. Here’s a selection from Reconnaissance and my little son, Django, who inspired the poem:
Look for Reconnaissance in paperback and ebook, on Amazon, Kindle, and Nook or ask for it in your local indie bookstore.
Justifying the Ways of Animals to God
Having little or no knowledge
about the fall of man,
the boy approaches the ringneck
with the zeal of a crusader
without pausing, as there is
nothing eternal to consider.
The confession had been shed already:
flaky, transparent skin hidden
beneath a rug in the unheated summer room—
the yellow necklace collaring
a brand-new black form.
The saga unfolds quietly
unaided by the dramatic pauses
of scripture nor capped off
with sermons on forgiveness.
The bite is swift, but not final:
there must be suffering.
Rebellion, pride, seduction—
these do not enter the minds of snakes
and a cat cannot tell a fallen angel
from a demon dancing
in the living room’s haloed light.
Eric D. Lehman: Literary Lion in Connecticut
It is fair to say there’s a true love affair between Professor Eric D. Lehman and the nutmeg state. When he arrived from Pennsylvania two decades ago, Lehman began to hike and discovered Connecticut’s little hills, rivers and forests. He soon fell in love with the museums and the wine trail and most importantly, fell in love with and married his wife, poet and professor Amy Nawrocki. His literary work celebrates our state like no other author, taking on the topics from Tom Thumb to The History of Bridgeport to A History of Connecticut Wine and so much more. In his recent work, Lehman takes on the legacy of our nation’s most notorious traitor, Benedict Arnold, in Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London.
Professor Lehman chose Benedict Arnold as his subject because his first experience learning about the figure failed to answer the questions he felt…
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Celebrating the Release of Reconnaissance
For my students as we catapult toward the end of the semester:
From Reconnaissance:
Prototype
Bless the first day of class
in its confined clutter. Notebooks
stacked and piled like sculptures
that say to the first lesson, I am ready
for you to feed me. Catapult us
into the realms of academia.
Picture chimpanzees swallowing
pineapple-white sheets in open cages.
Get your hands dirty, I tell them,
love the pages, the print, smell it
and remember papyrus. Break
the spine, hold it up to the light:
tell me who you are, author, tell
me your secrets; help me make sense
of your world. Transmogrify.
Cave dwellers, hierophants—make friends
with the exclamation point, bond
with the asterisk. Play with dirt.
Play with dirty words.
From Four Blue Eggs:
Annotating the Text
I tell my students to take up
their pens, savor the highlighter,
revel in the anticipation of appending
the words we make love to.
Most let their eyes follow the page
but not their untrained hearts, although
timidly, a few scribble whispers
on pages, becoming active, joining
in a dialogue with Bartleby.
One day they might revisit
these tactile memories, permanent
records of their comparative thought,
or maybe one of them
will remember this intimacy
upon finding, deep in the Tragedies,
her mother’s small handwriting
on a copy of Othello, urging Desdemona
to stay the course. One of these daughters
will find buried in the basement
dog-eared, spine broken, her name
underlined with a star next to it.
Coastal Connecticut Magazine Online
Coastal Connecticut Magazine‘s latest edition is now available. Check out the online Art section, which showcases a number of poems including four of mine. You’ll also find poetry by David K. Leff, L.M. Browning, Leslie McGrath, Maelina Frattaroli, and Joanne DiMartino. Check out the whole edition at your local bookseller, subscribe, and read!!.
Special Sale: Signed Copies of Four Blue Eggs
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.
Selection from Reconnaissance from Homebound Publications.
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
Reconnaissance arrives!
My author copies of Reconnaissance arrived today. Order today from Homebound Publications and your own copy will be on its way in no time. Thanks to Dick Allen, John Surowiecki, Audrey Henderson, Diane Donovan for their advanced reviews and cover blurbs. Click here for the press release from the University of Bridgeport.
Preview–Lord Byron
To get a jump start on National Poetry Month in April, and to celebrate the upcoming release of Reconnaissance, check out
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, . . .
* * *
Click here for the full poem. Order the full collection today and get it shipped two weeks early.
The poem was first published in issue 2 of Garbanzo Literary Journal
Press release from the University of Bridgeport.
Release of Reconnaissance–One month away!
Order my latest poetry collection Reconnaissance ahead of the release date and get advanced shipping from Homebound Publications. Official release is scheduled for April 7th.
Here’s a teaser: This “reproduction” was made in 6th grade. Pretty good for an up-and-coming art thief. Order your copy of Reconnaissance and see how the painting finds its way into the collection. 
Amy Nawrocki 