Thaddeus Rutkowski

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The poems in Tricks of Light, a breathtaking collection from award winning writer Thaddeus Rutkowski, meditate on myriad ways of seeing not merely the small, astounding mysteries of life but how seeing, the effort to see clearly, might be the most important thing of all. Under the clear and steady lines, with spare, precise imagery, the poems pulse with the competing urges of love and loneliness. There are also startling comparisons between observational moments and the tender practice of the Buddha that are perfectly balanced with humor. To the patient watcher, a city becomes the universe where the observing self on a bench contemplates a snail, which is, in fact, a wad of gum. At a time when reality itself is questioned and truth appears in short supply, the poet, through his keen eye, assures us that enlightenment is not only possible, but necessary.

Border Crossings is Thaddeus Rutkowski's first full-length collection of poetry. The "crossings" of the title are both geographical and psychological. In some of the poems, the speaker travels from one country to another. In others, he moves from one state of mind to another. His topics are his rural childhood and Asian heritage, his adult life in New York City, and his relation (throughout his journeys) to people, animals and nature. All of these short, first-person poems shed light on these topics through vivid, accessible language. Rutkowski strikes chords by describing experiences we've all had. In Border Crossings, Thaddeus Rutkowski collects an engrossing narrative of one-page poems that mine autobiographical terrain with a nuanced eye-the borders we devour while surviving the detritus we absorb. The writer's mechanism is to unfurl the speed of his imagination across new territories unlocked at every reading. Rutkowski understands that in maneuvering brief cinematic bites, the psychological glimpse can be a marvel of the subconscious-an intermorphed parallel reality, envisioned from edge more than center. With the storytelling facility of a novelist who skims the underbelly of the everyday, like Miyazaki with a shiv, Rutkowski places us squarely in line with his enormously creative yet quiet precision to expose the human vulnerabilities that we can't help but live through, for "it's the people, mainly the people / that we have come to see." -Edwin Torres author of Ameriscopia There is an eerie and edgy appeal to Rutkowski's spare poems and in his sly, deadpan humor as he takes potshots at an absurdist world. Sometimes playful, ultimately serious, the poet brings an unusual heritage-Polish and Chinese-to his observations of travels in China and about farm work (he grew up in central Pennsylvania). He also shows a Buddhist-like respect for wolf spiders, beetles and birds. One ends up cheering this poet's curiosity and humanity, wanting more stories, more poems. -Colette Inez, author of The Luba Poems Thaddeus Rutkowski's book Border Crossings is a collection of mind-crossing, relentless poems-the work of a person abiding in two worlds, never quite comfortable in either. The poems are straightforward, reflecting his American side, but they are rich with references to the world of his Chinese mother. In "Mother's Advice" he's told to "walk to the water circle, / dive to the bottom, / and nail your question / to the dragon's door. It is this near-voyeurism that leads Rutkowski to the truth he finds in words.

Roughhouse gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence and deviant sex that connect a surreal, semi-rural childhood with adult urban neurosis. Terse flashes of narrative, told from the point of view of a troubled youth, provide a stark sketch of an American family on the brink: a gun-toting father prone to inexplicable rages; a mother who speaks in ineffectual, half-remembered Chinese homilies; siblings rendered almost mute from excessive bleakness. And there’s the narrator himself, who responds to the torment of home and neighborhood bullies with increasingly aberrant behavior, including sexual bondage and a form of pyromania that requires placing a paper bag over one’s head and igniting it. In spare, unrelenting prose that has been honed to a point, Rutkowski ferrets out the hard bone of absurdity at the center of emotional displacement. Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in New York. His work has been published in numerous publications, including Fiction magazine and The New York Times. He is a winner of the Nuyorican Poets Café’s Poetry Slam. “[Rutkowski’s] sulfuric tale of family breakdown and fetishism chronicles the confusion and opacity of traumatic childhood even as it criticizes the American society that tolerates such inhumanity.”— Publishers Weekly “Rutkowski gives us a novel in bites and slices: sharp, shocking, and certainly not for the faint-hearted. Here is gall with gusto, a voice of reckoning, and writing to be reckoned with.” — Molly Peacock