Antrim House is pleased to announce the publication of John Leonard Stanizzi’s third poetry collection, Sleepwalking. This specially prepared and illuminated gift edition is devoted to the bright and dark sides of Night. Beginning at dusk and moving into the nightmare and magic of full night, the book ends with the grace of dawn. Pre-publication reviewers have been delighted with the novelty and elegance of Stanizzi’s “night music.” Bruce Pratt has written as follows: "To read John Stanizzi’s Sleepwalking is to become immersed in a dream from which you hope never to awaken. A work of stunning lyricism and language, this rich and elegant soliloquy conjures, in its contemplation of evening and night, balm for the soul and inspiration for the heart. No one will read it merely once." And this from Wally Swist: “Although John Stanizzi's poems often portray epiphanal moments, as brief as the initial spark of the first light of day, he is also able to write with precision about life's ‘underside,’ delineating an eerie shadow quality also found in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Stanizzi not only invites his readers to view what is ‘unseen’ but is also a weaver of song: ‘a concert of waxwings/ where the offering of daybreak/ whitens the road// their music sewn/ into the branches/ like lace/ so delicate/ it cannot be seen.’ “

John Leonard Stanizzi, a former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, has been a poet-in-residence at Manchester Community College and in the Middletown Public School system. In 1998 he was named New England Poet of the Year by The New England Association of Teachers of English, which featured him in Scattered Leaves — A Collection of Celebrated Poets of the Year 2000. He has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has been widely anthologized, and has had work in journals such as The Connecticut River Review, Embers, New York Quarterly, Poet Lore, Poets On, The Red Fox Review, Soundings East, Stone Country, and Tar River Poetry. He is currently an adjunct instructor at Manchester Community College and teaches English at Bacon Academy in Colchester, Connecticut, where for many years he directed the theater program. He lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, Connecticut.

Click here to read five sample poems.

Click here to view John Stanizzi's upcoming events

Click here to read ancillary material in the Seminar Room

BOOK STATISTICS

ISBN: 978-0-9798451-2-3
52 pages, 5" x 8" perfect bound gift edition

 

9

longer wanderings
than the solace of scented rooms

fiercer breathing now
than then

the blindness
the incessant drive of endings

until a weft of fine light
is spun and drawn
and the moon arches
above the ghetto

11

the swollen moon
the purple sky
the flecks of light
which are the stars
which is the light
that guides the sorrow
back into black
like the shadow of a barge

23

night branches hung with raindrops
whole notes
along an improvised staff

a metronome in the eaves
tracing the hollows
of silence

and a lamp
a tiny sunrise
to brighten the melody
28

morning haze
with its wings of light
against the dark

and from beneath the pale ocean
flowers to fill the clouded dawn
31

bless the cat
stalking in the stark white
of the sturgeon moon

and the highway
beginning to dry
beneath a pale rainbow

and the birds
which come as we sleep
and rise
from the river-brush
a negative of the stars
drawn from the undergrowth
by dawn

and bless
the coming warmth
fill your pockets with it
and wait
for the next
chaotic blue hour
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