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Shades of Isolation by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka

Name: Shades of Isolation by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka
SKU: 180800
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Original price was: $17.99.Current price is: $15.99.

Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka’s Shades of Isolation is stunningly powerful for story, lyricism and craft. To be in this book is to begin with the poet, age 17, in Poland, and follow her intense noticing of an interior and exterior world—the actual and the ephemeral.

“Ah, towards the river across the field/ like a whitened cloth./ The dew has fallen. Seems/ the cows are back in their sheds./ It’s quiet./ I can smell the milk/ and the dust stirred by chains, / dragged on their way from the meadows” Language like this turns life permanently into art.

–Grace Cavalieri, Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate

If you’re looking for happily ever after, Shades of Isolation isn’t the book for you. Over the course of her collection, Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka takes readers on a fraught and often lonely journey spanning mid-20th century Poland to the U.S. of today. In poems that mix the everyday with daydream, fairy tale, and nightmare, Kosk-Kosicka vividly and unflinchingly probes what it means to be human in a world that no longer resembles the world. Shades of Isolation is the work of a survivor: poems of yearning, absence, and loss refracted and—occasionally—redeemed through the prism of memory. If you refuse to settle for easy answers or rose-colored shibboleths, Shades of Isolation is the book for you.

–Kurt Olsson, author of The Unnumbered Anniversaries

Prize-winning poet Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka offers a glimpse into Shades of Isolation, the title of her luminous new collection. Guided by the poet’s sure lyric hand, we travel with her to Warsaw, to San Francsico, even to the surreal interior of a diner’s freezer. Despite the melancholy of “a pearl absence,” warm colors create a welcome balance. A “sapphire sea, ”“hot orange flowers,” and “red and yellow whispers” linger like small gems. Darkness, loss, war may threaten. Yet, Kosk-Kosicka reassures us that “inside a translucent globe, a candle glows.” In the midst of isolation, these poems calm us with beauty.

–Shirley J. Brewer, author of Wild Girls, Goddess of Swizzle (Apprentice House)

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Shades of Isolation

by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka

Paper

Pre-order Price Guarantee until May 1, 2026

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This title will be released on June 26, 2026

The poems in this collection explore the isolation most of us experience at one point or another in our lives. The characters in these poems range from an adventurous scientist who arrives in the U.S. from behind the Iron Curtain to a woman in a diner searching for her iceberg, from a climber on Mt. Everest to a princess trying to escape her glass mountain, from an elderly couple stuck in a building without an elevator to a dog chained among banana trees, from a dolphin in an aquarium to trees that act like people. All struggle to come to grips with separation and exclusion. The lyrical poems in this volume dramatize that while life often brings pain, we must not surrender to it. Instead, we must seek, observe, touch, and trust.

Hashtags: #poetry #life #isolation #solitude #people #nature #yearning for closeness #yearning to understand one another #admiring nature #admiring people #dogs #birds

Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka is a bilingual poet, translator, and photographer. Her two previous chapbooks are the prize-winning Oblige the Light and Face Half-Illuminated. She has translated five books by the Polish poet Lidia Kosk and serves as the Poetry Translations Editor for Loch Raven Review. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, San Pedro River Review, SLANT, Spillway, Tar River Poetry, and Tupelo Quarterly. A scientist born and raised in Poland, Danuta now resides in Maryland.