John L. Stanizzi’s poems show us what it means to pay attention. He directs us to the details that surround us, in nature, architecture, art, and world events, to all the ways our stories merge, compound, and unravel. Listen: what does it mean to be a tree? In the poet’s own words, whatever you are capable of imagining. A treasure of a collection.
– Lorette C. Luzajic, editor, The Ekphrastic Review, author, The Rope Artist, Winter in June.
Stanizzi is a particular man and poet. He is also part of a loving and sometimes careless human collective. And in both capacities, he knows love and loss, joy and despair, hope and hope’s opposite, dread. And because he is emotionally eloquent, his readers will know them, too.
SEE is a book to savor at every level of sensibility and craft: form, language, imagery, sorrow, joy, awe. Past, present, and future tangle in the individual human mind—poet’s and reader’s—and in the human collective where points in time—or the arc of it—may be painfully—or gloriously—illuminated, along with an awareness of the risks we take just by being alive and aware.
Stanizzi is an intentional and sophisticated poet who lives a life aware of time and space and his place in and between. He is aware, too, of history, culture, the natural world, family and their impacts, both on his personal experience and on the world he occupies.
The antidote to arriving at the end of this collection breathless—perhaps both literally and literarily—is to return to the beginning, the first lines: I ask, humbly, for a little more time//… to reflect//on all that I beheld in dreams//and in waking.
Yes. A little more time. Please.
– Pit Pinegar, author of Nine Years Between Two Poems, The Possibilities of Empty Space. and The Physics of Transmigration.
