Squalls

Ed Ruzicka takes us through “days of tragedy and joy” illuminating jeweled moments under
“a tender rain” when “Beads dangle at the tips off slender crepe myrtle branches.” Squalls navigates through the disasters of life on the Gulf Coast of storms and floods and more personal wreckage: “I had something I lost. I want / something others have. Tomorrow / is
around one more hard corner.” Yet past the hard corners he looks above to find solace “under
the mammoth / teat of a milky aurora...” So that when he gets back down to earth and its
storms, a plain fact acquires a grace of humble redemption and humor: “I have this, one
wheelbarrow full of rain.” This is a man rooted in his life who improbably writes poetry in
love of his daughters, against his losses and upon his joys. I like being in Ed Ruzicka’s world.
You will too.

—Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and The Missing Jew

Nothing is too insignificant—a toddler discovering its tongue or a flattened gum wrapper on a
path—to evade Ed Ruzicka’s eye, nothing too commonplace to resist exploring. However
small its beginning, each poem in Squalls becomes a flood, a story whose banks can’t contain the deluge of its images, and yet a story whose images never slow an inexorable push toward a surprising and satisfying finish. Each of these poems is its own intoxication.

—Charles deGravelles author of Billy Cannon: A Long, Long Run and The Well Governed Son

From a blind, old dog named Pup to a little girl who sings to it, from a house painter falling in
love, to how the homeless sleep, Ed Ruzicka brings a keen eye and a sympathetic ear to the
rhythms of life and the forms of poetry. Rain and river and raw love flow through the pages
of Squalls.

—Joe Cottonwood, author of Foggy Dog and Random Saints