New Poems

“In this language-rich collection, Trzyna ranges from abstruse reflections on imaginary numbers to descriptions of ordinary ‘boxes of rubber and leather heels’ in a cobbler’s shop. The wide variety in imagery—as in poems that honor the California oaks, or exotica like the ‘shocking crimson birds with emerald wings’ of Muscat—yields a poetry alive to and filled with respect for the natural world and the people who inhabit it. A delight to read!”


—Ralph “Skip” Stevens, author of At Bunker Cove and Things Haven’t Been the Same





“Trzyna’s strongly musical poems with ‘fat vowels like mustachioed porpoises’ paint portraits of the land and the people from Danzig to California. They bring us aunts playing gin rummy, the laborer who fled Alabama and grew onions on a toxic landfill, the Japanese gardener who killed himself rather than be taken to the camps. Trzyna laments what we’ve lost and helps us think harder about the world we want to live in.”


—Deborah Bacharach, Seattle Pacific University