Blazes
Blazes
Pre-order. We will ship purchased titles immediately after the book’s release date, October 30, 2020.
The culmination of over 30 years of studying and writing poetry, Zack Grabosky’s Blazes draws from the poet’s his journey through small towns and cities across upstate New York and south through Pennsylvania. The collection traverses a landscape changed and changing, guided by the music of insects and animals and the cairns, “blazes,” and other trailmarkers left by past selves and fellow travelers. As rich in sensuous detail as it is in wisdom, the book feels less like a debut than it does a mature work by a poet at the peak of his powers.
About Zack Grabosky
Zack Grabosky grew up outside of Cazenovia, New York. His interest in language and its ability to reveal inner life led him to study creative writing at Binghamton University. His poem-mentor and friend, Gerry Crinnin, gave him a life-altering push along this path. He lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with his wife Tomoko and son Baizhong.
Advance Praise for Zack Grabosky and Blazes
We have a gem in Grabosky—a powerful imagination and a powerful surge of self-discovery driving him to knowledge and high workmanship. Zack has maintained his local language, his great humor, and his proud affiliation with the American kids and folks and jobs and streets of towns—while his work also has a remarkable philosophical strength, a European shadow-strength—Rilke, Celan, the underneath, roots, the deathflows and biological camouflage gives his surfaces a unique sophistication and wisdom which together with American daily presences create something quite memorable and unique as art.
- Milton Kessler, author of Sailing Too Far
Many of Zack’s poems look into a campfire, a field, an attic space, a spider’s web—he feels something, and can write about it—moreover, he can write about what the campfire, field, attic space, spider’s web is feeling. He can move between two mundane worlds and create glory:
years afterward
a giant mud wasp
grew inside me
and shed my skin
Many poems include insects, vermin, birds and deer, closely recollected, and the abandoned or forgotten re-remembered. And sometimes it’s just the whistling confidence of sound with sense of play:
Mrs. Choconut poured us another round
beneath the boar head’s vigilant bristles.
These “blazes,” these trail markers made by chipping off the bark, expose 30 years of work, in this long-awaited first book. I won’t say anything more—POW!—except I hope Zack can live to be a hundred so he can remember a long time how I admire him and his poems.
- Gerry Crinnin, co-author of I Know You Know
Grabosky’s poems bring us to the intersection of the beginning and the end, of here and there, the dream and its memory, voices in the night and other voices in the night. And everywhere he finds blazes. Here’s one in the “songbirds that/with beautiful voices/mock our ancestors.” And another in the “lantern-light bobbing among the gravestones.” Here in the “light fractured through the windshield” and there in the “wild whoop!” Grabosky shows us the shock of really seeing what is, of finding “the hands of the dead who have touched the things we now touch/in an effort to connect.”
- Jonathan Dubow
Reviews
It’s been a long while since I have read any book straight through, left only to want more of the world it painted. The poems in Blazes by Zack Grabosky (Foundlings Press) are pictures of wonderfully complex worlds, characterized by the people who inhabit these worlds, and how the narrator witnesses the life within their eyes and struggles. Apparently, this book is a ‘culmination of over 30 years of studying and writing poetry’ and it definitely shows in the plunging depths of souls it dissects, as well as the sensual windows it uses to view everything it chooses to see. Blazes by Zack Grabosky came in the mail on Monday (it is now Friday), and I have immersed myself in the book’s poetics (conservatively) half a dozen times. The words are reminiscent of Wineburg, Ohio and the wonder with which Zack writes reminds me of Breece Pancake. I encourage everyone to visit this world this outstanding poet has delicately captured with a rusty rake of autumn leaves in an endless backyard.
Ryan Bunyak, The Secret Bookstore