Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Observations From The Edge Of The Abyss, Peter Johnson

English Faculty Publications

A book of prose poems/fragments available to download here for no charge

Bad Harvest, Dzvinia Orlowsky

English Faculty Publications

This powerful sixth collection of poetry is like some kind of new world Genesis singing its stories with lyric, grace, comic intuition and tragic force. The poet leads us over the remains of drought, along empty riverbeds that run parallel to failure and death, but then twists to capture a more elusive truth, pluck one last grain to hold, redeeming a bad harvest to sow hope in this soiled world. Bad Harvest burns like revelation.

Silvertone, Dzvinia Orlowsky

English Faculty Publications

These poems both celebrate and question the psychological existence we give to the objects that define our lives: the silver spoon from which the speaker sips, during each Epiphany, the sacred Borscht which she later catches her mother, after guests have left, pouring down the drain; the acoustic guitar on which the speaker’s father strums his minor-keyed songs from Ukraine; or the granite bust of a national poet that, in the hot sun, fails to inspire. With heart and humor the speaker examines what stays, goes, and how every object, once illuminated by the past, has the ability to take …

Convertible Night, Flurry Of Stones, Dzvinia Orlowsky

English Faculty Publications

Gertrude Stein writes: "Pink looks as pink, pink looks as pink, as pink as pink supposes, suppose." Dzvinia Orlowsky's poems in her new book are strung along the tension of a black thread stretched to near snapping as her tenacious, feisty speaker refuses for all women the typecast as another breast cancer statistic, another bumper sticker pink bow. Equal parts shepherd, punk, and auburn-wigged angel, Orlowsky, with torches in her hand, illuminates this dark passage with images of startling originality and honesty. The clear voice in this book joins those whose lives have been and continue to be altered by …

Except For One Obscene Brushstroke, Dzvinia Orlowsky

English Faculty Publications

What is moving about Orlowsky’s poetry is the manner in which she moves us through her images. Her poems progress like silent films that show the entire universe, then a galaxy, then a star, then a planet, then an organism, then an atom, then an explosion, although not necessarily in that order. There is an element of randomness, of transmitting events and thoughts as they happen, of moving from vastness to the finite; perhaps this accounts for the freshness, the beautiful brutality of Orlowsky’s poetry. – Jenny Boully, Maisonneuve At a time when so much contemporary poetry relies on either …

Edge Of House, Dzvinia Orlowsky

English Faculty Publications

Joseph Brodsky, in one of the essays in On Grief and Reason, writes that the twentieth century is the century of the displaced person. Writers in this century more than any other—from James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway to Paul Celan and Czeslaw Milosz to Seamus Heaney and Brodsky himself—have explored the ordeal of abandoning, voluntarily or involuntarily, a home that had become culturally or socially oppressive. Ukrainian-American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky, in Edge of House and Cuban-American poet Aleida Rodriguez, in Garden of Exile, while eschewing the political concerns of many of these writers, similarly draw on the impact of displacement …

A Handful Of Bees, Dzvinia Orlowsky

English Faculty Publications

The poems of Dzvinia Orlowsky negotiate matter and spirit with a feisty dreaminess. Wavering between these two worlds, the author of A Handful of Bees inhabits that pre-dawn landscape where wakefulness emerges only to recede, like a herd of horses or an outcropping of firs, into sleep mist. This is a countryside of honest uncertainty.
– Mary Maxwell, AGNI

I’d like to point out for particular mention Orlowsky’s handling of her religious background. Raised in a Ukrainian family, she was brought up to be a practicing Catholic. This subject has been explored by numerous writers, yet few can capture the …