David Stankiewicz’s debut full length poetry collection.
Time and landscape are the initial themes of David Stankiewicz’s MY FIRST BEATRICE, and the poet’s ear is fresh: “the Pax Romana of high summer,” “the hugely bruised twilight,” “tired luminous Krakow.” The sea, both time and landscape, is always in the corner of the eye. But as you read, you find that the stakes grow more urgent, that lightly-sketched Dante reference is real: Stankiewicz is the rare poet who can find transcendence in daily life, not as a formula, not because he’s looking for it, but as a shock. Again and again, these poems find the place where the self ends and the world begins, in the heart of contingency, where power and vulnerability are the same unknown, where you must “pick up one pebble, then another.” MY FIRST BEATRICE is a beautiful book.
-D. Nurkse