Publisher Description

"A searing memoir." Shelf Awareness "Powerful...Deserves attention and high regard." Kevin Stein, Poet Laureate of Illinois "Devastating, one-of-a-kind collection." Foreword Reviews "Gut-wrenching narrative lyric poems." Publishers Weekly "Taut...beautifully realized." World Literature Today In this major tour de force, John Guzlowski traces the arc of one of the millions of immigrant families of America, in this case, survivors of the maelstrom of World War II. Watch the book trailer at Raw, eloquent, nuanced, intimateGuzlowski illuminates the many faces of war, the toll it takes on innocent civilians, and the ways in which the trauma echoes down through generations. His narrative structure mirrors the fractured dislocation experienced by war refugees. Through a haunting collage of jagged fragmentspoems, prose and prose poems, frozen moments of time, sometimes dreamlike and surreal, other times realistic and graphicGuzlowski weaves a powerful story with impacts at levels both obvious and subtle. The result is a deeper, more visceral understanding than could have been achieved through descriptive narrative alone.This is the story of Guzlowski's family: his mother and father, survivors of the war, taken as slave laborers by the Germans; his sister and himself, born soon after the war in Displaced Persons camps in Germany; the family's first days in America, and later their neighbors in America, some dysfunctional and lost, some mean, some caring and kind; and the relationships between and among them all. As Guzlowski unfolds the story backwards through time, he seduces us into taking the journey with him. Along the way, the transformative power of the creative process becomes apparent. Guzlowski's writing helps him uncouple from the trauma of the past, and at the same time provides a pathway for acceptance and reconciliation with his parents. Ultimately, then, this is a story of healing. Because America is a land of immigrants with myriad and varied pasts, Guzlowski's story may reflect pieces of your own family's history, though details will of course differ. Something similar may also be the hidden story of one of your friends, or a colleague at work, or the sales clerk or waiter who serves you one day...or even, like Guzlowski, your professor of English literature.

Author Biography

Author Bio - Long (403 words): Over a writing career that spans more than 40 years, John Guzlowski has amassed a significant body of published work in a wide range of genres: poetry, prose, literary criticism, reviews, fiction and nonfiction. His poems and stories have appeared in such national journals as North American Review, Ontario Review, Rattle, Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Marge, Poetry East, Vocabula Review. He was the featured poet in the 2007 edition of Spoon River Poetry Review. Garrison Keillor read Guzlowski's poem What My Father Believed" on his program The Writers Almanac. Critical essays by Guzlowski about contemporary American, Polish, and Jewish authors can be the found in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Polish Review, Shofar, Polish American Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Studies in Jewish American Literature. His previously published books include Language of Mules (DP Press), Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books), Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press), and Suitcase Charlie (White Stag/Ravenswood). Guzlowski's work has also been included in anthologies such as Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Time Being Books), Cherries with Chopin (Moonrise Press), Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration (Editions Bibliotekos), and Longman Academic Reading Series 5 Student Book (Pearson Education ESL). Winner of the Illinois Arts Council's $7,500 Award for Poetry, Guzlowski has also been short-listed for the Bakeless Award and Eric Hoffer Award, and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and four Pushcart Prizes. He has been honored by the Georgia State Commission on the Holocaust for his work. In reviewing Guzlowski's book Language of Mules, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz wrote, Exceptional...even astonished me...reveals an enormous ability for grasping reality." Born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, Guzlowski came to America with his family as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents had been Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany during the war. Growing up in the tough immigrant neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, he met hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. In much of his work, Guzlowski remembers and honors the experiences and ultimate strength of these voiceless survivors. Guzlowski received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Purdue University. He is a Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Eastern Illinois University, and currently lives in Virginia. Bio of Charles Ades Fishman Charles Ades Fishman, who wrote the Foreword to this book,is an award-winning poet, editor and Emeritus Distinguished Service Professorof English & Humanities, State University of New York. While his extensiveoeuvre spans a broad spectrum of topics, he has particular interest in theHolocaust and the Jewish experience. Among his many credentials, Fishman hasserved as a poetry consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum inWashington, D.C. for more than twenty years. Other Books by John Guzlowski: Suitcase Charlie Paperback: 384 pages Publisher: White Stag/Ravenswood (2015) Language: English ISBN-10: 1508975523 ISBN-13: 978-1508975526 Lightning and Ashes Paperback: 96 pages Publisher: Steel Toe Books (2007) Language: English ISBN-10: 0974326453 ISBN-13: 978-0974326450 The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald Paperback: 36 pages Publisher: Finishing Line Press (2007) ISBN-10: 1599241749 ISBN-13: 978-1599241746 Jezyk mulow i inne wiersze/Language of Mules and Other Poems Translated into Polish by Bohdan Zadura Paperback: 109 pages Publisher: Katowice: Biblioteka Slaska (2002) Language: Bilingual Polish/English ISBN 83-87849-38-3 Language of Mules Paperback: 32 pages Publisher: DP Press (1999) Language: English No ISBN

Table of Contents

FOREWORD byCharles Ades Fishman xv PREFACE WhereI'm Coming From xvii My People xx BOOK I.HALF A CENTURY LATER Dreams of Unhurried Memories 2 The Wooden Trunk 3 *** My Parents Retire to Arizona 9 A Good Life 10 Windows Without Scars 11 What My Father Believed 12 My Mother's Hair 14 My Father's Mother Asks Him to Forgetthe War 15 My Mother Talks About the War 16 I. My Mother Reads My Poem Cattle Train to Magdeburg" 16 II. How Her Mother and Sister Died 17 III. The Beets 18 IV. Liberation 20 V.What the War Taught Her 22 WhyMy Mother Stayed with My Father 23 AGarden in the Desert 24 My Mother's Optimism 25 At the End: My Father 26 I. My Father Dying 26 II. Pigeons 27 III.A Sonnet About Dying 28 At the End: My Mother 29 I. My Mother Prays for Death 29 II. How Can I Ask My Mother 30 III. Dying in a Blue Room in Arizona 31 Souls Migrating in the Rain 32 BOOK II. REFUGEES Refugees 36 The Happy Times and Places 37 First Snow 39 *** Mother Tells Me How She Met My Father 41 The Day I Was Born in the Refugee Camp 42 Lessons 44 My Father's First Day in America 46 Promised Land 47 I. Coming to America, 1951 47 II. The Farms of Buffalo, New York 48 III. Winter in America 49 Looking for Work in America 50 I. What My Father Brought With Him 50 II. I Dream of My Father as He Was When He First Came Here Looking forWork 51 III. His First Job in America 52 Polish Triangle, Chicago 53 All the Cliches about Poverty are True 54 I. Poor Adas II. Sweet Little BirdsIII. The Storm I. Missing Pieces II. Dumb Polacks III. Kitchen Polish IV. My Grandparents Landscape with Dead Horses, 1939 96 September 1, 1939: The Day World WarII Began 97 Fear (A Poem Based on a Story byTadeusz Borowski) 99 *** My Mother Before the War 101 My Father Before the War 102 There Were No Miracles 104 The German Soldiers 105 I. German Soldiers Moving East 105 II. German Soldiers Come to a Polish Village 106 III. German Soldiers Stealing from the Dead 107 IV. What the German Soldiers Left Behind 108 My Mother Was 19 110 Cattle Train to Magdeburg 112 My Father Talks about the Boxcars 113 Grief 114 A Cross of Polish Wood 115 My Mother's First Winter in Germany 116 Sisters in the Labor Camps 117 Hunger in the Labor Camps 118 I. What My Father Ate 118 II. What a Starving Man Has 119 III. Among Sleeping Strangers 120 IV. The Germans Who Owned Them 122 A Story My Mother Heard in the SlaveLabor Camp 123 The Work My Father Did in Germany 124 A Life Story 125 My Father Tells a Story 126 Brief History of a Mother's Sorrow 127 My Father's Teeth 128 The Forests of Katyn 129 Third Winter of War: Buchenwald 130 My Mother's Dreams in Wartime 142 What My Father Knows About Killing 143 Today the Gypsies Are Burning 144 Temptation in the Desert 145 Photos of Dead Mothers 146 The Bombing of Magdeburg 147 Pieta in a Bombed Church, Magdeburg 148 His Dead Eye 150 Worthless 151 War and Peace 152 In the Spring the War Ended 153 TheStory Behind the Poems 155 InHeaven 159 APPENDIX "RedPoppies on Monte Cassino" 161 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 163 165 DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 167 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

Review

The son of two Nazi concentration camp prisoners, John Guzlowski was born in a Displaced Persons camp and immigrated to Chicago with his little sister and Polish mother and father shortly after WWII. This devastating, one-of-a-kind collection uses poems and short essays to reveal unspeakable moments from his parents' wartime experiences, and the less-than-open arms America mostly extended to millions of families fleeing the ruins of Europe. -- Matt Sutherland, "Devastating, one-of-a-kind collection." Foreword Reviews, Spring 2016; Guzlowski (Lightning and Ashes), a Polish-American writer born in a German refugee camp after WWII, recounts the horrible atrocities enacted upon his parents during the war in these straightforward, gut-wrenching narrative lyric poems. These snapshots of Nazi German rule illustrate that hardship didn't end with German surrender; the aftershocks radiated through successive generations. Guzlowski's simple language highlights the violence without offering any comment or consolation...each word means more in the sparse, unadorned language Guzlowski employs. Poems of this nature are not meant to alleviate the pain, but to help keep a record of it; to serve as a reminder that silence is not a crime, but forgetting is. -- "Gut-wrenching narrative lyric poems." Publishers Weekly, April 4, 2016; Like most immigrant kids, John Guzlowski never wanted to write about his Polish parents and the world they left when they came to America... Unlike most stories of this kind, however, Guzlowski's is told mostly in poems, which forces the author to wield formal control over a material that's painful and distressing. Luckily for us, in Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded (Aquila Polonica, 2016), Guzlowski writes taut poemshe cares about the narrative as much as the voice or the image...These beautifully realized lines not only showcase Guzlowski's poetic sensibility but also keep the poem from slipping into sentimentality...Guzlowski aims to write not only about his parents' lives but also about the lives of all those forgotten, voiceless refugees, DPs, and survivors that the last century produced, no matter where they came from." In doing so, he appeals to our shared desire to understand how the present continues to be shaped by the past. -- "Taut...beautifully realized." World Literature Today, April 13, 2016; Powerful...Deserves attention and high regard. To read these poems is to lift the lid on history and risk a step inside. One not only suffers the furnace but also endures, like the poet himself, the human will to counter history's inferno with an awful fire all its own. The poet's spare voice sings as austerely as his parents' trunk cobbled of Buchenwald wallboards. These poems do not flinch even as they take and give a punch: each note the pitch of absence given body, each silence a terrible waiting answered by singed arrival." - See more at: #sthash.2I3ItxwY.dpuf -- Kevin Stein, "Powerful...Deserves attention and high praise." Poet Laureate of Illinois "Deeply moving. John Guzlowski has written a powerful, lasting, and sometimes shocking book, one in which prose and poetry join hands to document a felt comprehension of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in WWII. He tells the stories his parents would have told had they not been living them. Thus these pages honor his forebears and indeed all those who were in the camps. The stories will haunt you but we must read them or fail to grasp what humans can do to humans. Anyone who wishes to consider himself or herself knowledgeable about the world in which, for better or for worse, we live, will read this superb book." -- Kelly Cherry, "Deeply moving. A powerful, lasting, and sometimes shocking book. Superb." Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010-2012) Some books take a lifetime to write, yet they can be read in one sleepless night, filled with tears of compassion and a heaviness of heart. John Z. Guzlowski's book of poetic memoirs is exactly such a book: an unforgettable, painful personal history, distilling the horrors of his parents' experiences in German labor and concentration camps into transcendent artwork of lucid beauty... A poet, writer and retired professor (Eastern Illinois University), Guzlowski has enjoyed 40 years of a successful academic and literary career... Intensely personal, the book is, at the same time, universal. Here's the secret of Guzlowski's impeccable use of language to capture the raw suffering of millions through the personal lens: "the bread of sawdust and sorrow..." "the scream that ends in screaming." The book is an historical and literary revelation: when I first read it, I realized that I did not even remember how many millions of Polish slave laborers were feeding Germany and building up its infrastructure, the machinery of war. Bringing this experience home, through intense, starkly realistic descriptions of dire facts and brutal events, is one of the strengths of Guzlowski's volume. It should be considered on a par with the work by giants of Holocaust literature - memoirs by Primo Levi, or stories by Tadeusz Borowski... -- "Unforgettable. An historical and literary revelation." Cosmopolitan Review, Winter 2016, "John Guzlowski's rugged poems rise like a land-bridge emerging from would-be oblivion to connect continents, generations, and a deeply felt personal present with the tragic, implacable history of the twentieth century." -- Stuart Dybek, "John Guzlowski's rugged poems rise like a land-bridge." award-winning MacArthur Fellow and poet, author of "Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories" "I could not praise it enoughmasterfully done. Reads almost like a novel." -- Professor Gregory F. Tague, "I could not praise it enoughmasterfully done. Reads almost like a novel." Editor of "Battle Runes: Writings on War and Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration" It's hard to read this book. Not because the prose is in any way turgid or the poetry difficult in that pretentious way that once was the fashion. It's hard to read this book because it is so honest. So clear. Like a crystal clear day you get in the cold sunlight of winter...it shines...like seeing into people's souls... This is a book to hold and to hug, to stroke softly. -- Martin Stepek, This is a book to hold and to hug, to stroke softly...it shines...like seeing into people's souls." award-winning poet, author of "For There Is Hope", Goodreads, _show_action=true&from_review_page=1 "Exceptional...even astonished me...reveals an enormous ability for grasping reality." -- Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, "Exceptional...even astonished me...reveals an enormous ability for grasping reality." on Guzlowski's poetry in "Language of Mules" "Remarkable blend of academic scrutiny with stark, uncompromising humanity. What I find fascinating is Guzlowski's ability to always say something new...balancing overarching social commentary with the smallest, heart-wrenching details." -- Michael Meyerhofer, "Remarkable blend of academic scrutiny with stark, uncompromising humanity. Atticus Review, on Guzlowski's earlier work. Atticus Review, September 3, 2013, "Guzlowski should join the annals of the great recording angels, not just for his unsparing yet compassionate language but also because he makes clear what is so easy to forget: that no matter how many years pass, such events never do." -- Lola Haskins, Florida poet and author, Gainesville FL, "Guzlowski should join the annals of the great recording angels." author of "Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems", on Guzlowski's earlier work "Brings us face to face with what we cannot allow ourselves to forget." -- Jared Carter, "Brings us face to face with what we cannot allow ourselves to forget." author of "Work, for the Night Is Coming" and "After the Rain", on Guzlowski's earlier work

Long Description

Winner 2017 Benjamin Franklin GOLD AWARD for POETRY.Winner 2017 MONTAIGNE MEDAL for most thought-provoking books."A searing memoir." -- Shelf Awareness"Powerful...Deserves attention and high regard." -- Kevin Stein, Poet Laureate of Illinois"Devastating, one-of-a-kind collection." -- Foreword Reviews"Gut-wrenching narrative lyric poems." -- Publishers Weekly"Taut...beautifully realized." -- World Literature TodayIn this major tour de force, John Guzlowski traces the arc of one of the millions of immigrant families of America, in this case, survivors of the maelstrom of World War II. Watch the book trailer at Raw, eloquent, nuanced, intimate--Guzlowski illuminates the many faces of war, the toll it takes on innocent civilians, and the ways in which the trauma echoes down through generations.His narrative structure mirrors the fractured dislocation experienced by war refugees. Through a haunting collage of jagged fragments--poems, prose and prose poems, frozen moments of time, sometimes dreamlike and surreal, other times realistic and graphic--Guzlowski weaves a powerful story with impacts at levels both obvious and subtle. The result is a deeper, more visceral understanding than could have been achieved through descriptive narrative alone.This is the story of Guzlowski's family: his mother and father, survivors of the war, taken as slave laborers by the Germans; his sister and himself, born soon after the war in Displaced Persons camps in Germany; the family's first days in America, and later their neighbors in America, some dysfunctional and lost, some mean, some caring and kind; and the relationships between and among them all.As Guzlowski unfolds the story backwards through time, he seduces us into taking the journey with him. Along the way, the transformative power of the creative process becomes apparent. Guzlowski's writing helps him uncouple from the trauma of the past, and at the same time provides a pathway for acceptance and reconciliation with his parents.Ultimately, then, this is a story of healing.Because America is a land of immigrants with myriad and varied pasts, Guzlowski's story may reflect pieces of your own family's history, though details will of course differ. Something similar may also be the hidden story of one of your friends, or a colleague at work, or the sales clerk or waiter who serves you one day...or even, like Guzlowski, your professor of English literature.

Review Quote

"These are poems whose images and metaphors have undergone the finest grinding, becoming cyrstal lenses to magnify the inner and outer lives of his parents. The clear poetic/narrative voice is remarkably strong yet elegant--this is not a random collection but the story of a family across generations dealing with the consequences of world war. We have through Guzlowski's persona a refugee child trying to make sense of the world with parents trying to make sense of their lives after the war's work camp. Guzlowski's book is a magnificent elegy to civilian lives lost or shattered in war and thereafter. Guzlowski has successfully undertaken a monumental, moral obligation."

Details