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Steven Ostrowski's speaker in Persons of Interest is unabashedly nostalgic, but these mournful, searing, and celebratory poems, while aiming for the heart, rise above sentimentality. The artists he admired growing up shook his world, challenged him, changed him, and ignited his own desire toward artistry. Bob Dylan's lyrics blew his mind--"Wait, you can even say that?" he asks incredulously, and in the opening poem, "Skeleton Blood Memoir with Bob," he says Dylan
Leaves tracks that harp in your blood.
Leaves you spastic balletic, moonful in your poems,
howl-round in the bedroom, a little lonely in the eye sockets
Ostrowski's language throughout this book has a kind of gritty musicality which is fitting when paying tribute to musicians of the '60s. In "Neil Young," the description goes primal:
Low in the fade-out sky, the moon-eye
of a ghost opens and shuts. Down
from the canyon's teeth comes an animal howl,
His passion for those he admires extends beyond music to artists like Willem de Kooning, Franz Wright, and Allen Ginsberg, those who made an impression as he moved into young adulthood and beyond. But, there are lesser, unsung heroes that crossed his path and played a role no less powerful: ex-lovers, friends, and even poetry itself. The poem "Wayward in the Blood" is an epistolary poem to his friend, Sull, in which he recalls a past life they shared during a care-free period when drugs, hitch-hiking, fishing, picking up girls--years of "lust, rebel and howl"--dictated an urgent agenda. Ostrowski reminds us that reveling in and relishing the past serves us in the present by reminding us of who we used to be and what we yearned to become. In "Ars Poetica" his budding talent is recognized after he recites his own poem to a class, and the teacher, a little stunned, asks him to read it again.
The phrase "persons of interest" conjures up images of law enforcement, investigations into possible suspects in criminal activity. The term carries sinister connotations, but in Ostrowski's world, his persons illuminate, instruct, and impart gifts, and there are sure to be more of these riches forthcoming if luck--or art--has any say.
--Nancy Botkin, from the Introduction
Steven Ostrowski, Professor Emeritus at Central Connecticut State University, is a poet, fiction writer, painter, and songwriter. He and his son, Ben Ostrowski, a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, are coauthors of a full-length book of poems, Penultimate Human Constellation (Tolsun Books, 2018) and a chapbook, Seen/unseen (Cervena Barva Press, 2018). Steven has published five other chapbooks, four of poems and one of stories. His individual poems and stories, several of which have won national awards, have been published in numerous literary journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Arts & Letters, Aji, Midway Journal, Harpur Palate, American Short Fiction, The American Journal of Poetry, and New York Quarterly. Steven's paintings have appeared in Lily Poetry Review (cover art), Stoneboat (cover art), The William & Mary Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and numerous others. In 2022, Steven's first novel, The Highway of Spirit and Bone, was published by LeFora Books. When not writing or teaching, Steven enjoys being a new grandfather, family gatherings of all kinds and in all kinds of places, playing men's league ice hockey, noodling with his guitar, hiking, traveling, and, not least, sitting, walking or driving around with Susan, his wife of 31 years, laughing about almost anything--the more absurd, the better.
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