poet
I am honored that Mouthbrooders has been selected as a finalist for the 2020 Connecticut Book Awards.
Check out the other finalists and register for the virtual ceremony event, October 15, 6:00 p.m.
Today
I miss the rhododendron that dried
last season and still rusts where orchids,
hot-house born, will be fed with
three sips of cold ice.
At my home in Connecticut I am able to get out into the world and see possibility despite quarantines and shutdowns. We live at the top of a hill, and one of my routine walks is up and down (about 1/2 mile both ways). A bigger loop brings me around the neighborhood, about 2 miles. We also have a semi-circle driveway with slopes and a sanctuary of laurels, oaks, and a few half-way hidden blueberry bushes. Twenty minutes, about 15 times around, is a mile’s worth of walking, enough time to circle and see what usually goes unnoticed. Repetition and wonder.
I found this little guy on a hard-to-figure out chestnut yearling. I prefer the worm’s philosophy about walking. On my own, I’m just walking in circles.
She wants to quell vertigo as certainly as a guillotine slicing the perpendicular
“Circumstance”
A poem from my latest collection Mouthbrooders, published by Homebound Publications.
Visit the store to order and support National Poetry Month, Independent Publishers, and writers who want to share their words.
Check out Brainwaves Video Anthology on You Tube. Take advantage of the filmmaker Bob Greenberg’s hard work, and browse a diverse anthology of videos featuring writers and thinkers from across the spectrum of literature and culture.
the ones who promised . . .
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.
“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
Also from the archives, 1992.
Blue Moon Diner
He might have been blind.
In my hourglass
recollection, I don’t believe
he ever looked at me
with his eyes–spacious,
window-like; each blink
the metamorphosis of a streetlight
from red to green
from grey to gray.
Aged cacti prickles
crowned his head; roadmapped
baldness charted the constellations
of his travels. To hear
restaurant monologues
in my novice ears was to see
wisdom printed on a napkin.
He said I looked New Englander, like himself.
I heard him say sheltered,
smiling. Professor
of all that is reachable, witness
of revolution, student
of places where clouds paint
shadows on the landscape,
his slight cricket body
carried mountains.
I saw myself journeying
through time tattered windows;
I saw the vast-heavy earth
deflate to a school child’s globe
filled with places I will go to
when I know the color of every star.
I sipped coffee, sugarless.
I did not ask his name.
I did not think
to ask his name.
Amy Nawrocki 