Winner of the 2014 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize (judged by Aimee Nezhukumatathil), Earth is the sixth book by poet Cecilia Woloch. Praise for Earth: In Earth, Cecilia Woloch writes with the wonder and resilience that are essential, not only to empathy, but to transformation. Woloch weds us to the natural world through language that is both straightforward and particular. A “river’s lifting dress” comes to represent history; branches swaying “like the arms of a woman waving goodbye” come to represent mortality. These remarkable poems are hymns and requiems; they are made of "blood mixed with earth." —Terrance Hayes These poems reflect a mature writer, a woman unflinching in both love and craft. The love is unabashed; the language boldly lyrical and image-rich. As a devoted reader of Cecilia Woloch's writing, I relish anything she offers, so I welcome Earth, this book of passionate, vigorous poetry, in which grandeur of spirit always redeems sorrow. As Woloch writes in the gorgeous prose poem "Afterlife": "I want to be fierce and joyful and a meadow when I'm dead." May we all be meadows with you, Dear Poet. —Holly Prado These poems gel together beautifully with a musical sense of foreboding and epiphany inhabiting the lines. These pages give us a terrain where a "honey of birdcall in our mouth" seems equally at place with a landscape populated with a willow that leaves the speaker "half afraid that the tree would fly." I want to return to Earth again and again. —Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Earth

Literature & Fiction

Woloch, Cecilia

Poetry

Two Sylvias Press

SACRIFICE is Cecilia Woloch's first collection of poems, hailed by poet-critic David St. John as "an extraordinary debut... The exquisite sensuality of these poems is matched only by [thier] heart-breaking delicacy ... Cecilia Woloch's poems unveil the wreckage of love after what has been sacramental turns sacrificial ... they are prayers spoken to, and on behalf of, a difficult world."

Sacrifice

History & Criticism

Cahuenga Press

A book-length poetic meditation that intertwines the author's personal journey of identity with the larger forces in the world that have shaped the Roma people's fate and fortunes.

Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem

Cahuenga Pr

A New Edition of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem by Cecilia Woloch. This New Edition of Tsigan includes new poems by Cecilia Woloch reflecting the ongoing saga of the Roma people and includes an expanded and updated timeline based on her new research. Praise for Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem: I read and reread it with admiration, indeed, but also with gratitude for the realization, the authenticity of its wandering fire. What depth and scope are given here to the very image of Tsigan, the Gypsy, until it becomes the spirit itself. --W.S Merwin A lyrical journey through history and memory so beautiful that at times it belies the deep pain it represents. Woloch takes us through fragments of memory that give glimpses into a life-long struggle with a hidden identity. Before I read Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, I knew what had happened to Gypsies across the ages — I knew the detail of their persecution under the Nazis; their gassing at Auschwitz — but now I understand it completely differently. Now I feel it as if I had lived it. Poetry so tender allows one to be led by the hand through an anguished and otherwise unapproachable world with dignity and love. Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem gives us time and space to breathe, to live the arc of history and be present in every age, and to take a personal journey into the deep struggle of memory and identity. It's difficult to say that reading about five hundred years of Gypsy persecution left me profoundly enriched, but there is no other way to describe how I feel. Woloch took me on a personal journey as seeker, historian, guide, storyteller. Touchingly authentic. --Stephen D. Smith, Executive Director, USC Shoah Foundation InstituteCecilia Woloch both eulogizes and celebrates the lives of Gypsies, a people who, through diasporas and a history of persecution, have endured centuries of dispossession, exile, poverty and extermination. What is extraordinary and profoundly compelling in this book-length poetic meditation is how skillfully Woloch intertwines her personal journey of identity with the larger forces in the world that have shaped the Roma people’s fate and fortunes. --Maurya Simon It has been said that poets write to give voice to those who do not speak for themselves. Cecilia Woloch does this in Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, and more. She gives form to her own urge for historical and personal identity. Her voice sings through free verse, prose poems, and a relentless beating rhythm of primary accents that underscore the abuses of Gypsies throughout western civilization where the soul of the Gypsy has been pursued to near extinction. But through the words of Woloch, Gypsy lives are caught in burning imagery for longer than a flash on the page. --Sylvia Melville I can’t think of anyone who writes like Cecilia Woloch. As she says quoting Isabel Fonseca, “among Gypsies, continual self-reinvention has been the primary tool of survival.” In Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, Cecilia Woloch reinvents herself as a Gypsy fire of language, a “single word” set flaming as a daring, dancing lyric conflagration in the reader’s hand. --Carol Muske-Dukes Upon the blank page of her grandmother’s, and every Gypsy’s death, Cecilia Woloch writes her own story. Haunted. Unsettled. Gorgeously so. --Ralph Angel

Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem (New Edition)

Poetry. "Cecilia Woloch's SACRIFICE is an extraordinary debut. These powerful, tender, and compelling poems introduce us to a family album of marvelous and charming figures. And, in the poet's romance of the family, the intoxicating presence of the father is its profound center of gravity. Yet the poet's reverence and affection for the idea of family is inevitably troubled, we discover in later poems, by the unravelling of a marriage...Woloch's poems unveil the wreckage of love after what has been sacramental turns sacrificial. Her poems are by turns reverential, devotional and incantatory--they are prayers spoken to, and on behalf of, a difficult world"--David St. John.

Small Press Distribution

Late is driven by the alternating energies of prose poems and free verse. Woloch understands a person’s true -relationships with family, friends, and lovers arrive late—if at all. The exquisite pathos in these poems disclose Woloch’s abiding empathy for family, children, ex-lovers, and strangers.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1956, Cecilia Woloch grew up in Pittsburgh and in Kentucky. She earned degrees in English and Theatre Arts from Transylvania University. Woloch has been active as a poet in the schools and teacher of creative writing workshops. She has received poetry prizes from The Wildwood Journal, Literal Latte, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Late (American Poets Continuum)

BOA Editions, Ltd.

Poetry. NARCISSUS is the winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award, selected by Marie Howe. Through prose poems in the form of "postcards" and free verse, Cecilia Woloch gives us a stunningly honest peek into relationships, at once acutely intimate and unabashedly compassionate. She "speaks" with a vivid poetic voice that Billy Collins has praised as "intense and precise." Cecilia Woloch is the author of three collections of poetry. Her poems have been featured in numerous journals and magazines, as well as anthologies such as Best American Poetry 2005, and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times. She is the director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and the Paris Poetry Workshop.

NARCISSUS

Tupelo Press

Her traveling poetrics are striking in the way that she defies the borders of "narrative" and "lyric"; she combines the two seamlessly, an enviable gift.
--Sacramento News &amp; Review
These poems move through love and death, sadness and euphoria, and across European and American landscapes, encountering lovers, strangers, and beloved ghosts. They arrive, finally, in a place of beauty, mystery, grief, and joy. Poems from this collection were selected by Marie Howe as winner of the 2006 Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award.
Cecilia Woloch was named 2004 Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry for her last collection, Late (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2003). She is founding director of the Summer Poetry Workshop in Idyllwild, California. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and Los Angeles, California, and travels extensively in Europe. From Devils Lake Journal: Celia Woloch’s collection Carpathia is about distance, both physical and emotional. Her poems occupy a lush landscape where the natural world succombs to loss, where fat bees [fall] into the wine” and the ghost swans have wings of death.” The highlights of this collection are her numerous postcard poems which feel balanced in their attempts to be both strange and authentic without becoming burdened with ironic oddity that I’ve seen so much in recent poetry. Her postcards move, making leaps with each new sentence, and their prose-poem form opens these poems up to be more peculiar in a way that’s all-together successful.” From The Cosmopolitan Review: One of the joys of Cecilia Woloch’s poetry is that it so beautifully and skilfully intermingles humour with emotional intensity, sensuality, and existential profoundness...Underneath it all, there lies a clear conviction that each of us could have been somebody else, could have been born and lived somewhere else, and yet We all dwell in one country, O stranger, the world.”

Carpathia (American Poets Continuum)

Self-Help

Relationships

Sur la route is a novel in postcard-like vignettes - a series of brief, vivid, poetic episodes that trace the path of a disaffected American woman "on the road" in France and western Europe. It's the winter of 1994 and she's fled the blandness of Los Angeles for Paris, carrying with her only a list of the names of friends-of-friends, a couple battered suitcases and a longing to be part of a more sensual, nuanced and mysterious world. She moves breathlessly through that world, the peripatetic rhythm of events mirrored in the restless, lyrical narrative. Along the way, she falls in love with a man, a woman, a city, a way of being in the world and her own life. By turns sexy, intriguing, and passionate, her experiences require her to open her heart as widely as possible, even (and always) at the risk of breaking it.

Sur La Route

Contemporary

Quale Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Woloch, Cecilia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Woloch, Cecilia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Woloch, Cecilia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Earth

Sacrifice

Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem

Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem (New Edition)

Sacrifice

Late (American Poets Continuum)

NARCISSUS

Carpathia (American Poets Continuum)

Sur La Route