NCWN

She Hands Me The Razor: Poems by Richard Krawiec

A Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection

Publisher: Press 53

Price: $12

Ordering Information: http://www.press53.com/BioRichardKrawiec.html

The razor in the title poem of this stunning collection can inflict pain or instill trust. It shaves away layers of duplicity and complicity, revealing the lies of love, the love of lies. There are no nicks in these poems. They slice into the very heart of life.   — Gloria Vando, author of Shadows and Supposes

Richard Krawiec’s She Hands Me the Razor is a moody collection of poems that is largely concerned with circumference. Thus, these poems summon Emily Dickinson, who wrote in a letter, “How lonely this world is growing, something so desolate creeps over the spirit and we don't know its name.”  In the title poem, the poet realizes that “it is always a matter of finding / another’s boundaries / one’s own limits,” and so it is in nebulous territory where these poems do their work of examining how one deals with existential darkness, where they try their damnedest to disavow the notion that it is irreparable damage that defines the contemporary human condition. — John Hoppenthaler, editor of Connotation Press and author of Anticipate the Coming Reservoir

She Hands Me the Razor is an edgy and satisfying marriage of tenderness and well-honed attentiveness to the connections, often fraying, among people and the various places in which they find themselves, both physically and emotionally...The poems in When She Hands Me the Razor ferry us through dangerous waters, leaving us finally upon the shore of grace, that infusion of morning light on a loved face. W.H. Auden wrote, In Memory of W. B. Yeats: "In the prison of his days/ Teach the free man how to praise." Krawiec's new collection of poems culminates in praise, which has always been the goal and gift of poetry. — Kathryn Stripling Byer, former North Carolina Poet Laureate and author of Coming to Rest: Poem