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 […]
WOVEN WATER
More than once we hear him address the sea;
the rage for order, as Stevens says, is blessed,
and even our dreams, as they wind across the width
SURVIVAL
Autumn bees
heavy on goldenrod
must know what we know
as they work that
THIS NOT THE POEM I MOST WANT TO WRITE
Here at dawn in mid-January
there are no lightning bugs,
nor is there an orchestra
of locusts and frogs,
TATTOOS
Unlike the other men in the family, my father
has no chains or skunks with attitude,
or his last name over crossed Italian flags,
SLEEPWALKING
a concert of waxwings
where the offering of daybreak
whitens the road
CARDINALS
I had seen them in the tree,
and heard they mate for life,
so I hung a bird feeder
and waited.