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Today's poem is "A Letter to Serafin"
from A Letter to Serafin

The University of Akron Press

John Minczeski resides in the Twin Cities, where he works and teaches. The author of four poetry collections and the editor of three anthologies, his poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry East, Quarterly West, Agni, Meridian, Pleiades, Free Lunch, and Nowa Okolica Poetow. His book, Circle Routes, won the Akron Poetry Prize in 2000.

Other poems by John Minczeski in Verse Daily:

Books by John Minczeski:

Other poems on the web by John Minczeski:
Two poems

John Minczeski's Website.

About A Letter to Serafin:

"In his poem 'Tour Bus,' John Minczeski writes: 'I wanted to break free/and make my own way/to the present world,' but what’s extraordinary is how achingly present and compassionate this accomplished poet is, whether pondering the plight of the October Primrose, or Birkenau’s 'few intact barracks turned black under soot and history,' Minczeski takes it all in and brings it back to the page with passion and grace."
—Dorianne Laux

"A Letter to Serafin is an absolute original . . . [offering] a subtle fusion of forthright plainspeak and a blend of near rhymes and soft cadences. Minczeski is a smart and feeling person who has thought long and deep about time and art, belief and the past, asking questions like: 'Why does a great painting affect us as it does?” and 'Why does something my grandfather touched touch me as it does?' and 'What is it that you and I and a farmer working the dirt in Poland or Sicily or Darfur or Iraq share?'"
—John Guzlowski

"A Letter to Serafin is a multilayered archeological dig of the author’s pasts—the ancestral past in Poland by way of his great-grandfather Serafin, the mythological past by way of ekphrastic examinations of Medieval paintings, the historical past of Auschwitz by way of a tour through the concentration camps, and the personal pasts that confront him with his own stinging failures and invisibilities made visible."
—Philip Metres



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