“F. Daniel Rzicznek’s Cloud Tablets presents to us prose poems as they’re meant to be―chock full of surprising images and compelling music. Where else would we find sheep in a library and a seraphim at a nightclub other than in a prose poem? Rzicznek presents these moments and others with the right mix of narrative and lyricism. There’s a gasp of surprise in each of these poems, exclamation points of existential joy waiting in the marginalia.”―Gary LaFemina “F. Daniel Rzicznek harvests the world as process in fine detail, isolating the moment of perception as an act of faith. Read Cloud Tablets and learn the marvel of the wakened life; the vision is unsparing, exacting, and beautiful to know. Uncompromising in observation, unhesitant in lyric dream, Rzicznek’s lovely voice is original, stripped in its honesty as he encounters, in the most poetic of prose, the stubborn and flexible world.”―Amy Newman

Cloud Tablets (Wick Chapbook Series 3)

Literature & Fiction

Rzicznek, F. Daniel

Poetry

The Kent State University Press

Neck of the World is the eleventh volume in the prestigious May Swenson Poetry Award series. In it, Daniel Rzicznek offers poems that, in quick angular language, capture the natural world and at the same time extend it into a surreal vision, sometimes dream-like, sometimes dark. Alice Quinn, judge for the 2007 Swenson Award, says this of Rzicznek’s work: “Throughout, the language pulsates, always vigorous, by turns knotty and crystalline. . . . In Neck of the World, we have a poet with a striking new vision--challenging, rewarding, and bold."

Neck of the World (Swenson Poetry Award)

Utah State University Press

Neck of the World (Volume 11) (Swenson Poetry Award)

A collection to be brought into the quiet clearings, poems from Vine River Hermitage have appeared in Briar Cliff Review, Cave Wall, Guernica, Gulf Stream, Lumina, and Memorious.
Enjoy "At Angles," in Issue 9.5 over at Diagram.
Read the 2008 interview with F. Daniel Rzicznek by Dr. Gary L. McDowell over at Boxcar Poetry.

Vine River Hermitage

Cooper Dillon Books

Poetry. "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.

Divination Machine

Parlor Press

Transversing the territory between the pastoral and the elegiac, F. Daniel Rzicznek's Settlers inhabits the hidden, wild places of the American Midwestern landscape. The idea of "settling"--that a landscape can be tamed, that a human consciousness can fall back into immobility--is one these poems grapple with and resist, all the while charting the cathartic effects of the natural world on a collective imagination dually wounded by the madness of the post-industrial era and the multiplication of tragedy via media saturation. Within the "settled" landscape, it becomes clear that nothing, in fact, can be settled. Love, compassion, forgiveness, and transcendence all turn out to be moving targets and Settlers offers glimpse after glimpse of an unstable world in whirling, mesmerizing motion. Where the exterior landscape of weather, light and water skirts the interior wilderness of dream, vision, and prayer, these poems go out walking with their feet in the marsh and their hats in the infinite clouds, hoping to find what exactly it means to be human in a world imperiled by humans, and the all the fascinating and frustrating complexities contained therein. What People Are Saying "Reading F. Daniel Rzicznek's Settlers is like putting on a pair of X-ray goggles and suddenly seeing our surroundings--lake, snow, buttermilk, car, dog--in a radically different light. By telescoping multiple time scales onto the same place, whether an imagined world without humans, a past of Civil War soldiers, or today's acts of gun violence, these poems expand what is possible in landscape poetry and offer a deeply-felt ethical stance. "Every where is a ceaseless center--," Rzicznek writes, and so poetry, this splendid book tells us, must be a ceaseless act of inclusiveness." --Tung-Hui Hu "Reading Settlers is a tactile experience, lush with precise knowledge of the abundance of the natural world. Rzicznek conjures up rural mysteries and the residue of disasters, creating a sense of déjà vu, of things carefully noticed long ago and then forgotten, now resurrected in these poems. In "Houses, Drifting," "A man wrestles / a wheelbarrow from the river's fluid din," an image that suggests what relics lurk beneath surfaces in this collection--surprising, wondrous, and, in fact, unsettling." --Mary Quade

Settlers (Free Verse Editions)

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