Invited to the Feast

"Do not hurry your journey," the poet says midway through this stunning collection. "Better if it lasts for years, so you arrive / laden with all you've lost along the way." Bonnie Naradzay's journey-as mother, professional, teacher, and longtime volunteer, leading poetry sessions in prisons, a retirement community, and among the homeless-has gathered much of both the lost and found, culminating in the publication of Invited to the Feast, a collection of poems and literary debut coming in her eightieth year. With wisdom gleaned over time and craft honed over decades, Naradzay presents us with poems that range from dank encampments under city bridges to windswept Irish cliffs and Venetian vistas, finding a common human thread in street talk and the classic tropes of myth and our shared literary heritage. Invited to the Feast is divided into three sections, each beginning with an epigraph that serves as a guide to reading each part. The poems collected here immerse the reader in the experience of interactive poetry classes, laments for mentors and family members who have gone, and far-flung travels. Free verse consorts with a diversity of forms, including the villanelle, ghazal, pantoum, sestina, and a poem in quatrains with the syllable count of sapphics. Throughout this collection we sense that, despite loss and brokenness, love is still possible, and every one of us has been invited to this feast.

About the Author :
For years, Bonnie Naradzay has been leading weekly poetry sessions in downtown Washington, DC, and also at a retirement community. Her poems here include those experiences. Her earliest influence was Robert Lowell's poetry; while at Harvard she attended his class on "The King James Bible as English Literature." In 2010 she was awarded the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize.

Review :
"You warm yourself at the fire, but I stand in the fire" Jacopone da Todi wrote, invoking the "abyss" of spiritual love. Bonnie Naradzay's poems burn with a radical empathy that can leave her utterly defenseless and open the reader to a world of unbearable light. Anchored in a homeless shelter, a hospice, a county jail, anguished by the dangers that haunt loved ones, these poems are frighteningly vulnerable to the suffering they discover-never performative, never sheltering in aesthetic catharsis. Invited To The Feast is a searing book. But it leaves us with a frisson of wild hope.D. Nurkse, author of A Country of StrangersBonnie Naradzay's superior debut collection, Invited to the Feast, begins with a sequence of poems about the author's teaching at an inner city shelter-turned-poetry-banquet whose guests include Basho, Issa, Richard Wright, and Bede. With a deft and masterful hand, Naradzay excises ornamentation and sermonizing to reveal in each of these poems the nourishment that results when life is served to us in its purest extract. In these pages we observe not a product of suffering but a process of entanglement, of how to be of help, to be help itself-and the urgency of that calling in our times. Here, all the living and the dead may find a place at the table.David Keplinger, author of Ice, awarded the Rome PrizeThese poems, filled with good conscience and abundant soul, merge the everyday with images of otherness, where poems on travel rub shoulders with the author searching for clothespins to hang laundry on the line. Allusions to classical literature mingle with "abundant ripe fruit sucked on by bees" ("Picking Blackberries Near Bunratty"). Naradzay's juxtapositions are the very bones of metaphor, and it is work which she handles with artful precision in this wonderful book.John Minczeski, author of A Letter to Serafin