Craig Czury
God's Shiny Glass Eye
In My Silence To Justify
Closing Out

KITCHEN OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION

CRAIG CZURY




From the book:

Excerpts from the poem
KITCHEN OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION

This is the kitchen of conflict resolution. My sister calls it…
she doesn't call it anything,
she just eats and excuses herself back to her room.

********

My mother and I have a running argument
(even though she's been dead many years) about the number of times
she threw me out against the number of times I ran away.
__________________________________________

Excerpt from the poem
THE GRÃDINA DE LACRIMI CAFÉ


Bine aþi venit to the Grãdina de Lacrimi Café in Bucharest.
Located on a street overgrown with weeds,
in a building no longer here,
torn down by Ceausescu for catering to the higher
appetites of intellect.
A quiet, weather-lit place. Open air seating.

Here all kinds of things
cling together
and their faces
superimpose.

The hostess and waiter are the most congenial native poets, moonlighting, you could say, to support their major vocations of being dead.

Once you arrive
you never know who has really come
and who has really come from the other side
and even farther than the other side.
__________________________________________


Craig Czury grew up in the northeast Pennsylvania coal
region and spent 15 years hitchhiking North America, working in carnivals, warehouses, canneries, construction crews, restaurant kitchens; unloading fishing boats, and organizing community poetry readings. Author of 20 books of poetry, his poems have been translated into Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Polish, Croatian, Macedonian, Albanian, and Italian. He works as a poet in schools, homeless shelters, prisons, mental hospitals and community centers all over the world. An avid blues harp
and bocce player, Czury earned an M.F.A. from Wilkes
University. He lives with the poet Heather Thomas
in Reading, Pa.


KITCHEN OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION
is a 44 page hand-stitched  paper book w/spine.
$10.00

TO ORDER  ON-LINE                               

From the US or Canada       


From Other Countries           
     

     To order through mail click here.

********************************************************************

 God's Shiny Glass Eye


God's Shiny Glass Eye is a revised and expanded edition, with photographs,
of the long out of print chapbook published by Great Elm Press in 1987.

Some new material has been added as well as
14 photographs of colliery remnants taken by Craig.

Book endpapers are actual
whiteprints from a colliery


God's Shiny Glass Eye is a montage that offers an impressionistic vision of the eastern Pennsylvanian mining country. The authenticity of the poetry is strengthened by Czury's strong identification with coal country. The poet's imagination and the anthracite world intimately merge to produce a poetry that is poignantly barren and stripped of any artificial embellishment. It is an angry poetry, but its passion is restrained and boils beneath the structure of the book.

                                                                       Michael Basinski


Table of Contents

GOUGED EARTH / GOUGED PEOPLE       
COALSCAPE     
UNCOVERING THE MINE SHAFT     
ZOLA IN SHAMOKIN     
FLOATING DUST     
THE SHIPWRECKED     
ANTHRACITE HISTORY     
SHAMOKIN
TO KEEP WARM     
BELLS LIKE SAD ANGELS     
WILKES-BARRE 1984     
PETERSON  VITALE  KELLY  
     THOMAS  RADYZYSKI     
AMERICAN     
MARCH 10 1951     
MEMORANDUM     
COALSCAPE     
COALSCAPE     
WAKING IN ONE OF
     BOYLAN'S  JUNK CARS     
MAMTICOKE BUS     
HACKING AND SMOKING     
GENETTI HOTEL     
AMONG SCHOOLCHILDREN     
FLOOD SITE     
FRANZ KLINE   
PRAYER FOR THE DISAPPEARED     
KOTO MUSIC  ON PUBLIC SQUARE     
CARDS KIELBASA     
AUGUST 2, 1981     
KULPMONT HEARSAY TALES     
I'M PROBABLY WRONG BUT IT FEELS RIGHT TODAY               
BREATHE, BABY, BREATHE     
LOVE LETTERS TO JERSEY GIRLS     


From the book:

GOUGED EARTH / GOUGED PEOPLE

January 22, 1959 the Susquehanna River burst through the roof of the Knox Mine, up from Wilkes-Barre, flooding the entire honey-comb of mines throughout the lower northern anthracite coalfield: 12 miners dead, thousands of miners out of work forever. I was 7 years old. Within 5 years our textile industry had moved south for cheaper labor...thousands of mill workers out of work or moved out of the region forever.

i inherited the black-star hole
through each one of these window panes

I inherited the voices and attitudes of the men and women who were shut down and abandoned. A tremendous anger...a tremen-dous silence.

One high school student, after listening to me read my poems about the gouged earth, gouged people, sulfur creeks and mountains of slag, asked me if I was an environmentalist. I flipped off the lights, opened the window, rearranged my chair...hacking and smoking.


God's Shiny Glass Eye is a 68 page
paperback, hand-sewn, with flat spine.

TO ORDER God's Shiny Glass Eye ($15.00) ON-LINE
    
     To order through mail click here.
****************************************************************************
 In My Silence To Justify

IN MY SILENCE TO JUSTIFY unifies ten years of poetry from a bridge between Mexico (Diary W/o Names), my new life with Heather across the Schuylkill River (Parallel Rivertime), my thoughts on writing (Between Sleep And Waking, Diverse Articulitus, White Pall), September 11 (Aphoristic Shrapnel), and its aftermath (In My Country). These are poems given to ideas and spacious thought grounded in a profound spirit without borders, without sanctuary.

In My Country

we are a village
flying toward one dream of wings on earth
what you try to keep to yourself
when you speak without opening your eyes
we breathe from each others lungs
even when you smoke with your eyes closed
staring at the face that becomes our face of sleep
under your dark eyelids
your leg with my leg
your head with my shoulder
the way we've known each other all our lives
stranger
one of us jerks and cries out here
here stop here
we all jerk and cry out
and what if this bus were to stop
who will remember whom
at the moment of stepping off


Craig Czury
Leiszs Bridge
Reading, Pa.
3/19/03

In My Silence To Justify is a 72 page paperback, hand-sewn, with flat spine.

TO ORDER In My Silence To Justify ($13.00) ON-LINE
    
     To order through mail click here.
***************************************************

 Closing Out
From the book:

as if it is just a matter
of closing my eyes
letters from an abandoned script
written and erased into this blank
lost conversation

Craig Czury (www.poet-in-education) works as a poet in schools, prisons, hospitals and community centers throughout the world. He is the author of 11 books of poetry, with poems translated and published in several foreign languages. His collaborative Poem Fusions (multi-voiced poetry performances) are a community doc-umentary of voices that have become backyard, stage and radio plays. Craig lives in Reading, Pa.

Paperback, hand-sewn, with flat spine.
Ten Dollars.

TO ORDER Closing Out ON-LINE
    
     To order through mail click here.