This specially prepared and illuminated gift edition is devoted to the bright and dark sides of Night. It begins in the crepuscular “blue hour” of Civil Twilight, descends into the darkness of nightmare, then ascends to a realm of moon-lit magic and surreal beauty before ending with the risen colors of birdsong dawn.
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 it contemplations of evening and night, balm for the soul and inspiration for the heart. No one will read it only once.
-Bruce Pratt – author of Boreal
Though 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 that eerie shadow quality also found in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Stanizzi not only invites his readers to 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.”
-Wally Swist – author of The New Life
precious darkness
blind as wind
the clocks
out of focus
3
night has fallen around you
and you remember the sea
as a nervous black space
upon which you tried to dance
11
the swollen moon
the purple sky
the flecks of light
which are the stars
which is the light
that guides the sorror
back into black
like the shadow of a barge
-Many of the poems in Sleepwalking were featured in the journal “eleven” published at Hofstra University.
