We’re celebrating April—National Poetry Month—with the release of Amy 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 in paperback and ebook, on Amazon, Kindle, and Nook or ask for it in your local indie bookstore.
Reading Anaïs Nin
The alphabet disappoints,
even with shapely curvatures,
sharp angles and mismatched
hieroglyphs. Letters wear masks,
syllables morph, and though
a sentence, with the generosity
of a fishing line, trails to the end
of a page then on and on, words
are no match for a torso bending
into another or a lick into the damp
velvet of sex. But the story
is what we have to ease us
into a lighted room. A painter
sketches his naked wife as she sleeps,
arranging her nightgown
so he can see her soft hair
and pink oak leaf lips
in the light she shies away from
when they make love.
In his studio he lays the sketches
around him on the floor until
he rises. When his wife enters,
he is bare, writhing
among his painted creations,
and in her envy she presses
onto him, hoping to surpass the art
he has set before her. But
in this brevity, they collapse
under the frailty of typed letters
on the page. If only they could
trace the rounded O or snuggle
into the caves of S, slip into
V and feel its depth, real and exact.
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.