About Travelers:
In these impressionistic, roaming poems, David Michael Belczyk journeys into memories and across cities and continents—Bayeux’s “soaring spires,” Rochester’s “shuttered clapboard houses,” Granada’s “aisles of palm through iron bars,” Puerto Rico’s “wind and rivulets [that] ran through the open doors”—as he searches for “a sacred place . . . hallowed by the ones that went before.” These are poignant songs of longing and desire that evoke the complexities of attraction to the real and imagined, the actual and the mythic, the love that compels the poet to meander for meaning “toward the end of all roads.” — Orlando Ricardo Menes, The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds
David Michael Belczyk’s Travelers is an ambitious, conceptual collection that covers a lot of territory, both geographical and emotional. This series of love poems to places examines the important connections we make to specific locations, environments, and the influence those things have on our lives. A fascinating exploration. — Jim Daniels, Gun/Shy and The Luck of the Fall
Travelers is Belczyk’s serenade to places and to place; multiple journeys of body and of mind. These poems constitute a nuanced seeking after desire, and the sometimes perplexing results of that search. —Gerald Costanzo, Regular Haunts: New and Previous Poems
The poetry of geography says that every place awaits the traveler. It’s what the poet imagines each place to be as well as what it becomes when he goes there. Local or distant, it becomes personal in the poet’s imagination. Take a trip with David Michael Belczyk in these instant poems, and you’ve seen the world. — Samuel Hazo, The Less Said, the Truer
About David Michael Belczyk:
David is a poet and fiction writer. His newest poetry collection, Travelers, was released in June 2023 with publisher Circling Rivers. David's earlier poetry collections have been published by Culturatti, Liguori Press, and Wipf & Stock. His Nine Lessons were created for and performed with Duquesne University's choirs. His recent novel, City of Bridges, was published by Wipf & Stock. In an ancient city that seeks itself among its mythical past, a courier is killed upon a bridge. A century later, the narrator and his friends join the city's renewed search for the item the courier carried, but they are drawn deeper into the unsolved mystery of the courier's death. David's first lyric-novel, Elynia, was published by Dark Coast Press. It explores the unexpected relationships between four generations of characters and their communication across the divides of time and place. Their kaleidoscopic lives persevere in hope despite a relentless storm that erodes their monuments and memories.
About Regular Haunts:
Gerald Costanzo, long known as one of the best contemporary poets of satire, focuses specifically on American themes that, though presented as parables, fables, jokes, and put-ons, remain darkly serious in tone. His subject is the mythic landscape of America itself: the transitory, popular, consumer culture of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century life.
Costanzo evokes a sense of having arrived on the scene too late, of having missed the heyday of American innocence and possibility, and now—in the present—is forced to live with diminished experience. He mourns a culture where genuine emotion cannot be found but where its semblance can be endlessly marketed. Regular Haunts is a retrospective collection of Costanzo’s work that also includes nearly thirty new poems.
About Gerald Costanzo:
Gerald Costanzo is a graduate of Harvard and of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. For more than fifty years he has been a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University where he founded the University Press. Originally from Portland, Oregon, he resides in Mt. Lebanon, PA and Nehalem, OR. His most recent book, Regular Haunts: New and Previous Poems was selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser for his series at the University of Nebraska Press.