Divination Machine

F. Daniel Rzicznek Free Verse Editions Edited by Jon Thompson Information and Pricing 978-1-60235-118-9 (paperback; $14.00); 978-1-60235-119-6 (PDF, $9.99); 978-1-60235-522-4 (EPUB, $9.99) © 2009 by Parlor Press; 82 pages. Bookstores: Order by fax, mail, or phone. See our "Sales and Ordering Page" for details. What People Are Saying F. Daniel Rzicznek is a shapeshifter of poets—sometimes a watchful heron, sometimes a wheeling hawk, sometimes a gliding owl, and always an exquisitely observant crow. Poetry, he says, is a paranormal event. Divination Machine makes the case. —Djelloul Marbrook  We have confessional poets, who write about themselves; nature poets, who write about place; experimental poets, who write about language.  And we have F. Daniel Rzicznek, who finds “many centers to the world,” whose Divination Machine resists simplification into any one category. Rzicznek is a poet for whom “Everything / is a piece of the vision.” — H. L. Hix About the Author F. Daniel Rzicznek’s previous collections of poetry include Neck of the World (winner of the 2007 May Swenson Poetry Award from Utah State University Press) and Cloud Tablets (winner of a Wick Poetry Center Chapbook Award). He is also coeditor, with Gary L. McDowell, of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice, forthcoming from Rose Metal Press in 2010. His poems have appeared in journals such as Boston Review, The New Republic, Orion, Gray's Sporting Journal, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He currently teaches English at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.        Contents Acknowledgments Blueprint Cost of Living Machine Visions Thicket Crow Station Storm King Evening: Disorder Alewife River Enough Ice Bed: Visions Thicket Light before Daybreak Far Natural: History Doctor of Maps Plea Nightjournal Thicket Onus Rote Daylight: April Inner Crowd Natural: Enemy Glass Bed: Visions Thicket Negative Wherever Apollo Angelbrains Huron Vision Silver: Screen Over: Night Divination Thicket Blackworm Vesper Inquiry Inaugural Visions Winter Notice Fire: Side Thicket Waiting Turn Captiva About the Author Free Verse Editions   Divination F. Daniel Rzicznek ~ My life listens for a place where the snow leans and melts, runs down, naked as the bright water that turns green in the mind. And where does green leave the mind? The state shines with counties all in shades— names of towns charging through the colors like runoff. Show me, will you please, where the waters arise from? Next to this meadow, this road, above these roiling woods, a spirit: a face breathing out the dark. Nightjournal F. Daniel Rzicznek A story I’ve never heard: a man’s wish to be burned at death, his ashes stewed with pulp to make a book on the flightlessness of certain birds. The dead are no longer the dead— not even a scattering of chipped teeth through grass. ~ Starlight number, starlight number: the earth’s cannon points everywhere for I am exploding. The fish beneath the skin thrums its dorsal, flexes its veil. Little threads of my beard fall away past the mirror. Only my face remains submerged. ~ A few leaves catch in my skull, a briar flies from my tongue. Confessing to a dream is confessing only to an act imagined when imagination has a mind of wind, when rain takes a peony apart, scatters it down into beauty.