Dervish

by Gerard Wozek

Overview

Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award. This rich whirl of the dervish traverses a grand expanse from bars to crazy dreams to fruition of desire.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781928589112
Publisher:	Gival Press
Publication date:	09/28/2014
Pages:	62
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.15(d)

Editorial Reviews

"In his debut collection Dervish, Gerard Wozek shares generously of an open, attentive heart and a wide-ranging vision. In these pages, find potent spells, incantations, recitations, and prayers that summon forth the poet's sharp determination to move beyond mere survival into a fiery thriving, even--perhaps, especially--in the midst of loss and devastation. By Jove, these poems shimmer."
—author of Mr. Bluebird

Gerry Gomez Pearlberg

"The farflung geography of Gerard Wozek's Dervish suggests a journey, but the real landscape here is the untamed territory of the open heart. This restless gay man's garden of verses is as innocent and worldly as a dried bouquet hanging behind the counter of a caf� in Prague. Heartfelt, graceful, eloquent and erudite, Gerard Wozek's poems are compelling and moving---redolent, perhaps, of some future nostalgia for lessons learned long ago, in youth."
—author of A Flame for the Touch That Matters

Michael Lassell

"Gerard Wozek looks for miracles in everyday moments, chance encounters, trysts and rituals. Whether set in Paris, Vienna, LaSpezia, Mexico City, or Saugatuck, these poems written 'in remembrance of seraphs' celebrate a gritty reverence for the body as they draw on pagan and Christian influences. In Wozek's poems, gay sensibility and spiritual longing are one and the same."
—author of novels Carlyle Simpson and Hawkwings, and the prose poem chapbook Survival

Karen Lee Osborne

"'Hunger is instrumental', says Gerard Wozek, and in Dervish that same hunger makes the world luminous. Whether describing a Viennese coffeehouse, a beach by Lake Michigan, an erotic bookstore, or a Parisian cemetery, Wozek captures the unceasing, insatiable whirl of the boy's appetites and the music Eros leads to existence. Reading Dervish, we join the speaker's attempts to 'trust the pulse, this sweat,' to 'keep [touch] holy,' to carve out a 'destiny / that matters.'"
—author of Flint Shards from Sussex, Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Contest-1999 ---Jeff

Jeff Mann