Out Now!
Krygowski’s ferocious wit and no-nonsense truth-telling thrill and sting. Taught that “tenderness was an apple and love a mouse’s sharp teeth,” the girl who felt “small and elsewhere” transforms into a flamboyant-voiced woman in the scorching present tense. Even looking back is less droopy nostalgia than an act of resistance. The Woman in the Corner is a woman who has lived, and struggled, and knows that struggle is often (though not always) beautiful.
Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize winner, frank: sonnets
These poems haunt me. These poems are out and about in America. These poems shout at dope fiends, manspreaders on city buses, middle-school punks hogging a bike path, drivers drunk on their own rage. These poems are the love child of Walt Whitman and Joan Jett, and they show a side of this country that's as real as that envisioned by Jefferson and his buddies. These poems don't sleep, ever.
David Kirby, author of More Than This and Talking About Movies with Jesus
If Nancy Krygowski's moving new collection refuses to allow us to slip the limits and desires of the flesh, it also reminds us that it is possible to be moved in each moment from difficulty to tenderness, from disappointment to awe. The moonflower seeds send out their unremarkable sprouts. These are poems populated not only with the aging and the ill but also with the aggressively innocent or naive: hearts of all kinds. And women. Women who must constantly reckon with their roles as mothers and daughters, wives, neighbors, friends. These are poems that invite us-in a world whose beauty is surely scuffed and muffled- to reopen our lives to rich and quiet joys.
Kathleen Graber, author of Eternal City
Previous Book
These are courageous poems. The music, the language, which I love, is based on a terrific sense of things, and I don't know if it is the music or the knowledge which I most admire. This is a wide-eyed, assertive, wild, well-read, street-smart, edgy, loving, suffering, heaven-crazed poet. It's a joy to find her.
Gerald Stern
Winner of the 2006 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize