Books – Page 2 – Third Wednesday Magazine

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Patricia Williams planned to write about Chinese art after retiring from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, as a professor of Design History. Things took a different turn and in 2013 she began writing poetry – proof that it’s never too late to do something new. Life, like poetry, is always subject to revision.

Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Poetry Book written in 2018.

I’ve read lots of poetry and appreciate a good poet’s careful and often spare use of words. Patricia Williams belongs to that group. In two of my favorites, “The Midwinter Night is Long” and “Magic in Collapsing Stars” much is expressed in a few words about the aspects of being human. I especially like the poignant lines from “Islands” and the great story, vast application and wonderful ending in “There Goes the Neighborhood.” – Jerry Apps, Award-winning author of 35 books on rural history and country life, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin

Williams’ intimacy with the Midwestern countryside, its souls and circumstances, tumble forth from these well-crafted poems. We sojourn through “the season’s bullying chill” as “gales sweep the lawn clean of needles” and sense the “mortuary stillness” before a twister. In lovely language, her Midwest Medley resonates elegant simplicity and truth. — Nancy Austin, Author of Remnants of Warmth

Patricia Williams’ poems about “the middle of America” virtually glow with the beauty – and many of the irresistible quirks and foibles – that she finds there. Some gleaming freeze-frames of winter are particularly stunning, as in “The long-night moon / shimmers over a glacial setting / polished by winter’s breath”. We’re also treated to Williams’ fresh take on the area’s Great Indoors, where we feel right at home under the antlers and beer signs of the Northland Bar and Grill or crashing a sing-along with Aunt Mae at the player piano. Williams’ guided tour through a part of the country too often bypassed (or flown over) is a poetic experience not to be missed. – Marilyn L. Taylor, Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Emerita

Midwest Medley: Places & People, Wild Things & Weather is available at:

Traveling

headshot_Stanizzi2 John L. Stanizzi is author of the collections – Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, and Chants. His newest collection, Sundowning, will be out this year with Main Street Rag. Besides Third Wednesday, John’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Blue Mountain Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, and many others.

John is a teaching artist for the national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud. A former New England Poet of the Year, John is the prose editor for the online journal Abstract Mag TV. He teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.

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You can order John Stanizzi’s books at these links:

Hallelujah Time! (Big Table Publishing, 2014), Dance Against the Wall (Antrim House Books, 2012), Four Bits (Grayson Books, 2018), Chants (Cervena Barva Press 2019).