Or Else by Diana Loercher Pazicky

We begin with Else, a word “warranting capitalization,” “that enchanted island” of a noun that captures so much of poetry’s potential, the hunger of the question what else, the urgency of or else. Else is, as Diana Loercher Pazicky reminds us, a word “redolent with danger” – just as poetry is. To open oneself to possibilities is a perilous and liberating act. In this book populated with the Furies, Moira Shearer, Arachne, Poseidon, that profligate cloud gatherer Zeus, Prince Henry the Navigator, nude beachgoers, a gathering of college alumnae dressed “like Druid priestesses,” “a joyful reveille of birds,” dressage horses escaping their riders, a Madagascar tortoise, a mourned cat, a student confessing in a note pinned to a tree “I wish I was able to breathe,” Or Else carries us into a world that is both vast and intimate, enduring, and fragile. It is a world in which we are able to breathe. That’s what good poetry does: it gives us breathing room. “The pencil erases/begins again/its clean/straight/ line.” In all the resonant riches Pazicky offers us, there is through it a clean, straight line.

–Christopher Bursk, author of The Improbable Swervings of Atoms

Diana Loercher Pazicky‘s poems originate in a seemingly casual observation or event, a word or sentiment; yet whatever the initial impulse, Pazicky transmutes these occasions into powerful poetic reflections that deepen the reader’s sense of the world we live in.

​The lines exalt in word-play and ​fantastic imagery, but the pleasures of poetry at the same time invite us to ​discover a range of feelings,from the ironic  jeu d’esprit to the most somber meditations on time and death.

–Miles Orvell, Professor of English & American Studies, Temple University

Poet Diana Pazicky writes brave and big in her new collection, Or Else, in which she edges toward cliffs of the unknown, plumbs for the mysteries of long love, gripping losses, and the “earth’s dark secrets.” By a well-crafted balance between ironic humor and the periodic agonies of living, she encourages us to buck up and examine all manner of challenges: a holiday in the Caribbean where, on a nude beach, the middle-aged speaker, though tempted, remains clad in the safety of her “Miracle’ suit,” a saddened husband as he digs a backyard grave for the beloved family cat, Zeus as a “disasterologist’ and “horny old lecher,” a nostalgic memory of a grown son’s boyhood when mother and son explored a life-charged wood together—its streams, found arrowheads, and sunsets—which brings on a sadness for “all that remains [there] without them, / all that might be gone.” Again and again Pazicky’s poems remind us that a life lived fully can be had only by embracing laughter along with the inevitable tears that quiver at its outer edges.

–Bernadette McBride, author of Whatever Measure of Light.