just released! here are the links:
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.
