The author of over 20 poetry collections, Craig's books have been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Croatian, Albanian, Lithuanian, and Russian. He is also an editor and translator of a number of collections and publications, and is featured in numerous anthologies and periodicals, both in print and online.
AND IF YOU SAW ME
New and Selected
Prose Poems & Poems
And If You Saw Me spans fifty years, a lifetime of experiences Czury frames as if holding each memory up to a camera obscura - the light each image casts is transmitted through the pages of this book, imprinting directly onto the imagination.
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Jump into these poems hand in hand, your inner child with your wiser older self. You’ll rely on them both to get the best view from where you stand.
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Between the river and the cemetery I have a secret walk through the alleys no one knows. And if you saw me? I think I’m invisible, past the sleeping dog and dead squirrel. I take the trash route. I take the broken glass route. I take the rocks and rusted metal route, leaning against your beat-up car to empty my shoe. A phone rings inside a house. Hey, I’m a burn barrel back alley kinda guy, deflated and who knows where. I go looking for myself in your tires and overturned shopping carts. I am a runaway shopping cart with one good wheel rickety, wobbling toward home.
~ From Fifteen Stones, Craig Czury
IN PRINT. $25 USD
To order, email craigczury@gmail.com
2025 - Moonstone Press
195 pages, Paperback
POSTCARDS &
ANCIENT TEXTS
"Fourty years of Napkin Poems" is how Czury playfully refers to this postcard-sized collection of travel poems which take the reader from his high school hallway in rural anthracite Pennsylvania across country by thumb to the Oregon coast and open skies of Montana, by train to Montreal, and later by poetry to Mexico, Croatia, Albania, Macedonia, Lithuania, Italy, Greece, Kosovo, and Argentina - in no particular order.
Czury's reader has the sensation of walking through the bright carnival of time and cultures, simultaneously assailed and regaled by sights, sounds, smells, sensations as if walking the crowded midway of the poet's memories. “Postcards & Ancient Texts (1969-2019)” is breath of fresh air in a Covid-delineated world - reminding us that journeys can still be had, and that the covetable trips take us far from habitual paths, both in person and on paper.
IN PRINT. $15 USD
To order, email craigczury@gmail.com
FootHills Publishing, 2020
75 pages, PostCard Shaped Paperback
Hand-Stitched Binding
FIFTEEN STONES
In Fifteen Stones, Craig Czury traverses multiple continents, dimensions and decades. It is a magnetic web of words, woven from fish scales, seaweed, handlebars and tire treads, reaching across an ephemeral geography between coast lines and chalk lines. Czury steps neatly out of the white space on his page, pats his hair down like since a kid, and dives into the form of prose for these poems.
Written in four sections, part one is from northern Italy, written while tooling around town by bike. Part two is a playful bob and weave, slipping between the serious and the absurd, wondering if there is a difference. Part three slices down the coast in Chile, the way one cuts into an avocado, hungry for the ripe spirit inside. In the final section, he gives the band free reign, moving into a smooth cacophony of form and improvisation.
If, as Edmond Jabès says, "Every work is a hymn from the other side of memory to a memory that is spellbound," then Fifteen Stones is Czury's hymnal and he is both choir and conductor, leading all of his ghosts in glorious song.
IN PRINT. $20 USD
To order, email craigczury@gmail.com
2017 - NYQ Books84 pages, Paperback http://books.nyq.org/title/fifteen_stones
THUMB NOTES ALMANAC
Hitchhiking The Marcellus Shale
An exciting collection of "docu-poems" crafted from a collage of voices gathered while Craig hitchhiked Route 29 in Susquehanna and Wyoming Counties during the height of the Marcellus Shale gas drilling in Pennsylvania.
The result is a fascinating, multi-voice snap-shot album, or almanac, of people and their varied thoughts while living through a dramatic energy play.
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"The voices Czury chronicles in his Thumb Notes Almanac are of everyday people trying to navigate through the thunderous noise of this region's divide. From shards of conversation struck up in the cars and trucks of people open enough to pick him up when he had his thumb out, Czury creates a verbal mosaic: fractured pieces of fractured conversations from a hydro-fracked region."
~ Kimberly Crafton, excerpt of Preface
IN PRINT. $15 USD
To order, email craigczury@gmail.com
FootHills Publishing, 2016
87 pages, Paperback
Hand-Stitched Binding
GOD'S SHINY GLASS EYE
Second Edition
From God's Shiny Glass Eye:
Uncovering The Mine Shaft
by accident
we stumbled upon the last breath
and knelt down
our one good ear tight against its lips
and rotting teeth
we could not tell
if it was night or the eclipsing sun
but from somewhere deep within its wound
we heard drums
and a circle of clapping bones closing in
again the wooly mammoth being roused
from its black slumbering dust
crude figures of men with sticks
and mud-sling barrows
illumined the cankerous mouth
IN PRINT. $20 USD
To order, email craigczury@gmail.com
FootHills Publishing, 2016
68 pages, Second Edition Paperback Hand-Stitched Binding
KITCHEN OF
CONFLICT RESOLUTION
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From Kitchen of Conflict Resolution:
Between where I live and where I feel alive
the story's already there,
I just have to configure the words.
Rain gutters and storm windows.
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I'm sitting here at the open window sweating like (1) a hurricane (2) this iced glass (3) a stop sign. I'm waiting for the click and I don't get it unless I'm alone.
My sister and I can't wait for TV trays in front of the television.
Boston Blackie's pulling a double-cross on a warehouse heist in the radio and it's 1945. I'm not born yet, and the world's all worked up over something I'll never understand my old man yelling at me for.
IN PRINT. $15 USD
To order, email craigczury@gmail.com
FootHills Publishing, 2009
44 pages, Paperback
Hand-Stitched Binding
Out of Print Titles
But We May Have Copies - It Never Hurts to Ask! Email To Request Copies of the Following Titles:
A Few of the Titles In Translation
With Enormous Thanks to The Translators and Editors!
