Barney and Gienka, Poems by John Surowiecki
The mix of private and public history in John Surowiecki's Barney and Gienka makes for a rich, nuanced collection. The author's narratives of family history do not ignore the touch of larger historical currents on his family.
Sample Poems by John Surowiecki
"I love this book's wry efficiencies, 'the pretty girls in their floats, / goddesses of the local parlors: / beauty, ice cream, funeral.' I love this book's capture of a community's distinct era and ethnicity, using such emblematic details as 'Mrs. Jablonski's thin soprano voice' or 'Mr. Niedzwiedzki's pink house.' I love this book's dedication to the Connecticut landscape in which 'Each house wears the face of someone old / and failing and shadows of airplanes dart / from roof to roof like angels of death.' In Barney and Gienka, John Surowiecki takes the gyroscope of illness and sets it to a slow, sad spin that is both beautiful and wrenching." --Sandra Beasley
"Part Dante's Virgil and part Groucho Marx, John Surowiecki writes about his parents, aunts, and uncles with seriousness and humor, elegance and wit. The narrative of his poems begins as his father wakes after a stroke and weaves back and forth across the years, taking the reader to prewar movie theaters, an army hospital in England, a ballbearing factory in the States, and the small-town Connecticut world his parents lived in after the war. Where other writers would treat the lives of such working-class people with pointless nostalgia or sentimentality, Surowiecki reveals real lives in all their cluttered and touching complexity." --John Guzlowski
"Just as Gienka, according to another one of Surowiecki's compelling characters, is made of light, so are these poems. Other ingredients include hospital Jell-O, shad, familiar voices, factory-greased ball bearings, a wizened nurse with false teeth, and the shadow world of four o'clock movies on TV. The poet's tools for mixing these are an infallible ear, an ecumenical mind, a deeply sympathetic heart, and an acute eye; the result is a book of unforgettable poems about people who not only struggle mightily against death, but, more importantly, for fully lived lives. They are heroic in the truest, everyday sense of that word, and they remind us again and again how fragile, resilient, sublime, ridiculous, and godlike we are." --Jon Andersen
John Surowiecki is the author of two other collections of poetry, The Hat City after Men Stopped Wearing Hats (Word Works, 2007) and Watching Cartoons before Attending a Funeral (White Pine Press, 2003), as well as five chapbooks.He is the recipient of the Poetry Foundation's first Pegasus Award for verse drama. His play, My Nose and Me: A TragedyLite or TragiDelight in 33 Scenes, is based on his chapbook, Further Adventures of My Nose. It was performed at the 2008 AWP convention in New York, at the University of Connecticut's Nafe Katter Theatre as part of the University's Creative Sustenance Program, and at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater as part of the Poetry Foundation's Poetry on Stage program. In 2006, he was awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize (sponsored by Nimrod International Journal) and the Washington Prize, and received the silver in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival National Competition. In 2005, he was awarded a Poetry Fellowship, Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, Office of the Arts. He received a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Connecticut and won the University's annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize on two occasions. He presently teaches poetry courses at Manchester Community College, Manchester, Connecticut.
ISBN: 978-1934999943, 80 pages, $18.00