M. Szlyk's New Poetry Book Just Released

 just released! here are the links: 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BFV4BZDF - for paper back, 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BG699D4Y - for ebook

title: WHY WE NEVER TRIED TO FIND THE ELMS

author: Marianne Szlyk

publisher: Poetry Pacific Press (Vancouver, Canada)

release date: september 22, 2022

intro:

Why We Never Tried to Find the Elms gathers strands of poetry to weave them into a tapestry of memory and imagination. This whole includes a glimpse beneath a mirror that once appeared to show everything so clearly. Two examples are the title poem and “The Roadrunner,” poems that grew out of conversations with others about what they themselves remembered about the incidents depicted. The tapestry includes cultural and historical context as in “Woolworth’s, 1970,” a meditation on the absence of people of color in my memories of the small New England city where my mother grew up, and “Frida without Arms,” an imagining of Frida and Diego as young squatters in 21st-century Detroit. This tapestry contains not only my parents’ beach house in Maine or the Willow jazz club in Massachusetts but also Food Lion and Tippecanoe Mall as these too have been part of my quotidian. But the tapestry goes beyond myself and my perspective (and corrections to it) as later strands like poems inspired by Hung-Ju Kan reveal. Some say that the chapbook is best at presenting variations on a theme. However, even a chapbook is a whole world peopled by more than the poet.

advancd praise:

When I began reading through this chapbook, I experienced something new and quite enjoyable. Rather than reading the poems and projecting my own life experiences onto them, I was transformed into an audience of one, watching a documentary with the poet as narrator. There was no dialogue, just the narration of each poem as the scene it described played on screen. As each poem drew to a close, the scene faded from “what maybe was” into “what is now” with a twinge of regret for experiences gone and unrecoverable. It left me feeling wistful, longing for times and places that obviously weren’t part of my life, but that I had just been pulled into. This is poetry at its finest. It transports, illuminates, and lingers after the book is closed.

 - James E. Lewis (j.lewis), Editor of Verse-Virtual poetry journal and author of a clear day in october, do you hear it?, leave a light on, and as if a caress plus several chapbooks.

Marianne Szlyk’s poems are a lyrical bounty of quiescent, riveting and deeply moving experience (s). They consistently embody the credo saxophonist Lester Young shared with an interviewer in 1959: “You’ve got to be original, man!”

They are also deeply arresting travelogues which investigate the complexity of human experience – and the everyday (and sometimes overlooked) wonders of our brief time on this planet.

If this volume was an old school diner jukebox, I’d be the guy feeding it quarters all night.

You’ll revisit these poems like much loved locales.

 - Reuben Jackson, Poet/Archivist. Author of Scattered Clouds (Alan Squire Publishing)

It’s always a sensory pleasure to walk in Marianne Szlyk’s shoes viewing her world through her keen eyesight and insight. In “Why We Never Viewed the Elms,” Szlyk paints the portrait of her past. She takes us on a tour of her mother’s Catholic college without leaving the car. We stroll through Woolworth’s in the 1970s where there are no black people at the counters, Food Lion during the Pandemic and Bellevue Library during the Quarantine where “Some patrons have/ become ghosts waiting/at Metro’s closed stations/for the trains that no one/living rides anymore.” Won’t you come along?

 - Sharon Waller Knutson, author of What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Say and Survivors, Saints, and Sinners.