Catholic Boy Blues - Hardcover

Norbert Krapf

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1941365019 ISBN 13: 9781941365014

Publisher: Greystone Publishing LLC, 2014

Synopsis

Norbert Krapf, past Indiana Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize nominee, emeritus prof. of English at Long Island University, and author of twenty-five critically acclaimed books, has written a new book, Catholic Boy Blues: A Poet's Journal of Healing. Norbert is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. After fifty years of struggling with his past, he felt that by confronting it in writing, he could offer fellow victims comfort, healing, and a sense of freedom from the long-term effects of abuse. He also believed that the book, seven years in the making, could help caregivers who counsel and minister to survivors of abuse. Catholic Boy Blues gives insight and encouragement to those who have not yet confronted their abuse and to friends and family members who want to understand better the long-term effects of abuse. After Norbert began to write about the emotional turmoil which affected him, his feelings of betrayal by God and Church, and his years of troubled silence, he experienced healing and a renewal of spirit. The 130 poems he selected from the 325 he wrote came in four voices: the boy he was, the man he became, Mr. Blues (a fictional friend, mentor, and counselor), and the Priest. The honesty and power of Norbert's words convey representative emotions and thoughts of those abused. Although the poems aren't always pleasant, they give the reader a vivid look at the helplessness, anger, betrayal, and isolation any victim suffers, but in the end, as Jason Berry says, "Norbert Krapf fuses the rolling wisdom of blues singers with incantations of his own past that echo sacred ritual. Along the way he turns trauma into elegy, and takes suffering to a plateau of human triumph."

About this title

About the Author

Norbert Krapf received his M.A. in English from the University of Notre Dame and also his Ph.D. in English and American Literature, with a concentration in American Poetry. He taught at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University 1970-2004, where he is now emeritus Professor of English, was Poet Laureate 2003-2007, and directed the C. W. Post Poetry Center. He twice served in Germany as a Senior Fulbright Professor of American Poetry, at the Universities of Freiburg and Erlangen-Nuremberg. He was also a U.S. Exchange Teacher at West Oxon Technical College, England. In June of 2008, he was appointed to a two-year term as Indiana Poet Laureate, in which capacity he continued his efforts to reunite poetry and music, brought Indiana poetry to TV and radio, give readings and talks in libraries and other venues, and visited schools to share with students his enthusiasm for reading and writing poetry and prose memoir. Norbert Krapf has written or edited 25 books, two of which are his translations from the German. Nineteen of these books are collections of his own poetry, including Somewhere in Southern Indiana: Poems of Midwestern Origins (1993), Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany (1997), and Looking for God's Country (2005), all available from Time Being Books, and Bittersweet Along the Expressway: Poems of Long Island (2000) and The Country I Come From (2002), sixty poems set in Indiana.

Review

The spirit of Norbert Krapf emerges from this terrible crucible to offer a testimony to the power of God to bring light out of darkness and, finally, life from death. -- Archbishop Joseph Tobin "The Criterion"

About this edition

• Publisher: Greystone Publishing LLC
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1941365019
• ISBN 13: 9781941365014
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224