River Nocturne by Z.G. Tomaszewski now available for pre-order • Empty Mirror

Z.G. Tomaszewski’s poetry book, River Nocturne will be published by Finishing Line Pressin in the summer of 2018 and is now available for pre-order.

Advance Praise

“Tomaszewski is mystic and realist. These poems engage with the world, with the ordinary, with palpable, and with all we have in common, while also transcending all of it, seeing it from greater and greater heights and also sharper detail. Each poem in River Nocturne is an individual journey; taken together these journeys are ‘Everything… The truth… Wrinkling… // One morning…’. Astral and physical, Tomaszewski has written a collection to which his readers will return again and again 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

“The poems in River Nocturne, informed by a dynamism of opposites (puerex/senex, quantum/cosmic, magical/mundane, conscious/unconscious), bring us wondrous news of a life lived from the center of the soul, that place of mysterious conjunctions and ultimate polarities. Tomaszewski’s practice of poetry goes on deepening in beauty, rigor, and concern.” –Li-Young Lee, The Undressing, Behind My Eyes, and The Winged Seed

Pre-order River Nocturne from Finishing Line Press here.