No Farther Than the End of the Street – poems – Benjamin Niespodziany

No Farther Than the End of the Street
neighborhood poems by Benjamin Niespodziany
Okay Donkey Press, 2022

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How just recently undiscovered the poems feel in Benjamin Niespodziany's No Farther Than the End of the Street, and how secretly they demand distraction. I've been ill of late, and in this lateness have come to believe that revelation does not come, after all, to those who wait. So I waited, and held, then read, this inescapably freed book. I am weak and want to say things simply. I strain to recall whole silences. I write that love is made of two people telling each other that they have a room at the hotel when neither of them do. Niespodziany takes the nameless and the familiar at face value and lets one mask disguise another. I am weak, I strain, there is joy here. In this verse, a neighborly, twinning joy...and a sadness brought to earth both by the alien mediocrity of grief and by those few doubled things that go through absurd shortages to single out loneliness.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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book is HERE

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