Ecstasy Among Ghosts
Description These are poems in which the poet’s generously extended Italian family, terrible despair and regenerating love are as salty as the ocean that beats just beyond the margins. To read this book is to ride a roller coaster of unbridled emotion. Reviews Through the sluice of memory John Stanizzi’ shapes the torrent that pours […]
Sleepwalking: Poems
Description This specially prepared and illuminated gift edition is devoted to the bright and dark sides of Night. It begins in the crepuscular “blue hour” of Civil Twilight, descends into the darkness of nightmare, then ascends to a realm of moon-lit magic and surreal beauty before ending with the risen colors of birdsong dawn. Reviews […]
Dance Against the Wall
Description John L. Stanizzi’s fourth poetry collection, Dance Against the Wall, will stun readers into a fuller livelihood of the heart. Fearful pain and self-incrimination are here, but in the end it is love and a sense of the brotherhood among all living creatures, human and animal, that inform the book. Reviews I love a […]
After the Bell
Description After the Bell, reads like a Greek play–both a comedy and tragedy, the chorus being the high school body of a small town. The poems are by turn many things, “a tale about some pain or some desire.” In language both gorgeous, elegiac, and deeply rooted in the social world, Stanizzi never flinches from […]
Hallelujah Time!
Description When former New England Poet of the Year John L. Stanizzi decided to compare Bob Marley’s lyrics with the biblical excerpts that had inspired them, he didn’t expect to experience such a profound change in his own sense of the world. Over a period of five years, he found himself wanting to go beyond […]
High Tide–Ebb Tide
Description John Stanizzi’s richly imagistic and moving book, High Tide, Ebb Tide, is an inspired exploration of delight and loss. The poems create a rich sense of place, where “snowy egrets haul their orange feet / into the low marsh tide,” “two swans curl their necks— / place their heads just below the surface,” “the […]
CHANTS
Description Poetry. A memoir in sonnets. “This is what history sounds like, a song that takes over us until we join the chants and become part of history. Thanks to John L. Stanizzi for showing us another path of walking into today.”–Romeo Oriogun Reviews “These loose sonnets with the punning title–CHANTS–push us in various directions: […]
Four Bits: Fifty 50-Word Pieces
Description Four Bits is a clever collection of short pieces by a masterful poet and story-teller. In each of these fifty 50-word prose poems, John Stanizzi dazzles with his perception, humor, and story-telling. “Four Bits,” a colloquial term meaning fifty cents, is worth much more than spare change. Humor, pathos, and insight into the human […]
SUNDOWNING
Description In Sundowning, John Stanizzi gives us his own world, which we enter via his irresistible voice and words of imaginative power. The book encompasses childhood to grand-fatherhood. If, throughout, we ponder interrelations of ideas, it is mainly through weavings of people, feelings, and natural images. His demanding father’s decline and death through Alzheimer’s serves […]
P.O.N.D
Description Overheard along the shore. I would like to give you a brief description about the poems here and the project from which they emerged. They are from a one-year-long project called POND. The poems are acrostics. Here is my process. Everyday, at different times during the day, I would visit our pond with notebook […]