MOON OVER THE CROSS BRONX EXPRESSWAY by N.G. Haiduck

“THE POEMS in Moon Over the Cross-Bronx Expressway walk the edge between despair and joy in modern urban life, seized in all its details. N.G. Haiduck shows a keen eye for the less than obvious, a discreet empathy for people that takes the form of observation, listening, and a sense of place as significant and specific. Haiduck’s “place” is the Bronx, its streets and waterways, the highway landlines connecting it to the rest of the city and beyond, and the strata of decades lived there as a young and less young woman, lover, mother, jazz buff, distiller of stories and memories, embodied in pain as in joy. Like another jazz-loving poet, Hayden Carruth, Haiduck is equally comfortable with a supple, short-lined free verse, with ballad stanzas, with the sonnet as a narrative vehicle. Like him too, she is aware, and makes her readers aware, that each recorded observation, each lyric transformation, is our collective and cultural history. This is the work of a mature woman who is at the same time a young poet, whom the reader can feel stretching and succeeding just as the speaker of one poem succeeds finishing that last lap at the gym. We have the assurance of that experience, and the excitement of that next stretch.”

–Marilyn Hacker