by Craig Czury

84 Pages, 5.5 x 8.5

Library of Congress Control Number:  2017937389

ISBN:  978-1-63045-047-2

Publication Date:  09/08/2017

Press Release

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In Fifteen Stones, Craig Czury traverses multiple continents, dimensions and decades. It is a magnetic web of words, woven from fish scales, seaweed, handlebars and tire treads, reaching across an ephemeral geography between coast lines and chalk lines. Czury steps neatly out of the white space on his page, pats his hair down like since a kid, and dives into the form of prose for these poems. Written in four sections, part one is from northern Italy, written while tooling around town by bike. Part two is a playful bob and weave, slipping between the serious and the absurd, wondering if there is a difference. Part three slices down the coast in Chile, the way one cuts into an avocado, hungry for the ripe spirit inside. In the final section, he gives the band free reign, moving into a smooth cacophony of form and improvisation. If, as Edmond Jabès says, "Every work is a hymn from the other side of memory to a memory that is spellbound," then Fifteen Stones is Czury's hymnal and he is both choir and conductor, leading all of his ghosts in glorious song.

Recommendations

Warning! You can't go on with this book without changing your room! Every line has the capacity to communicate something to you and jeopardize your settlement. Did Czury write this? Or was it Conway Twitty? Or perhaps those Sikhs playing cricket in an Italian park? In fact, you can find the author at a street corner in Valparaiso, or beside a lake near Rome, or lying on the grass in Medellin. To read means to travel and to go through something, and to replace the commodity of reality too. The world and words travel in these pages to illuminate the reader's imagination. You are forewarned.

—Juan Cameron, author of La pasión según Dick Tracy

Craig Czury has been on the road his entire lifetime. Czury takes the temperature of our clime while on the move, in motion, just like the great poets of yore. In Fifteen Stones, readers will discover landscapes and languages, and those who hold them dear, on the move, in migration through Czury's deeply imaginative and incandescent prose poems.

—Mark Nowak, author of Coal Mountain Elementary

Fifteen Stones is a finely-structured sequence of nonlinear thoughts. Time is adrift in the author's fragmented search for "a belonging." Craig Czury is a nomad who crosses physical and metaphysical boundaries as if he were in permanent spiritual exile: Was I the same me? As was the case for Edmond Jabès, surrealism is Czury's choice to untangle daily tangible nonsense, drink coffee and write the fog clear. And with his piercing sense of humor, he brilliantly ties literary references and life experiences.

—Zingonia Zingone, author of Le tentazioni della Luce