River Nocturne by Z.G. Tomaszewski

“Each poem here is an individual journey, engaging with the world while also transcending it; taken together these journeys are ‘Everything… The truth… Wrinkling…’ Astral and physical, Z.G. Tomaszewski has written a volume to which his readers will return to ‘…share the author’s vision: / a cat goes missing and the religious search begins.’”

–Laura Kasischke, Where Now: New and Selected Poems 

“In this book Tomaszewski writes that he likes “language when it’s peeled apart and put back together”, and in these poems he puts ordinary language back together in vivid and extraordinary ways.  A drowned oboe breathes up a single note from the depths of a river and a world is recomposed of interlocking marimbas.  We can almost hear Baudelaire in this music which ventures out into the chaos of surrealism and then, almost seamlessly, transforms into deeply felt life experience.  The music of these poems is both feeling and sound—lyric improvisations that convince us they are essential.”

–Dan Gerber, Particles: New and Selected Poems

“Z.G. Tomaszewski plucks ordinary elements from the riverine world, captures liminal perceptions from the dream and spirit worlds, stirs and steeps his ingredients in the cauldron where memory meets imagination meets language, and pours forth incantatory poems in which the ordinary shows itself to have been extraordinary, dreamlike and spirit-rife all along. When I lifted my eyes from River Nocturne to my own rivers and world, my perceptions felt cleansed and my contract with language renewed.”

–David James Duncan, Brothers K, The River Why, and My Story As Told By Water