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.
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.
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 are the ones that take us far from habitual paths, both in person and on paper.
IN PRINT. $15 USD
To order, email craigczury@gmail.com
(image of front and back covers)
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
LITERARY CRITIQUE of FIFTEEN STONES
by Prof. Daniela-Carmen Stoica, Ph.D. Presented at Fan S. Noli University in Korce, Albania.
2017 - NYQ Books84 pages, Paperback
PRESS RELEASE with REVIEWS
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.
"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
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.
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:
AMERICAN KNOW-HOW:
Patent Pending
Paper Kite Press, 2016. 48 pages
Paperback, Glossy Cover, Flat Spine
From American Know-How: Patent Pending
write a poem
on the back of a door
lock it from the other side
and knock three times three times
. . . _ _ _ . . .
three short three long three short
it's a mystery of the kabbalah
poems and doors open a deaf ear to morse code
INQUIRE ABOUT AVAILABILITY - Email Craig
IN MY SILENCE TO JUSTIFY
FootHills Publishing, 2003. 72 pages Paperback, Hand-Stitched Binding
From In My Silence To Justify
we're sitting in dark
corners smoking
the middle of the day
sitting in dark corners
talking in low tones
middle of night
in dark corners filled with
our dead
hours into centuries
the dead who are also
tucked away in dark
corners
as if they're thinking
as if they're quietly reading
the situation
as if almost an air of self-satisfaction
walking our women home at night
confident nothing's wrong
our women who're acting uptight
nervously pretending
nothing's wrong
SHADOW ORPHAN SHADOW
Pine Press, 1996. 32 pages
Paperback, Machine-Stitched Binding
From Shadow Orphan Shadow
when I take the leap
will my shadow take the leap
as an act of love
and grow wider on the ground
when I fly to get a better view
Bi-Lingual Edition - Spanish/English
(Spanish version by Roseann DeCandido Kamin & Alicia Partnoy)
EXCEPT
FootHills Publishing, 1990. 58 pages Paperback, Hand-Stitched Binding
From American Know-How: Patent Pending
King Douglas Hotel
Day of rain and caffeine
before sun-up.
A deep bronchial coughing
through the wall -
one of the children.
The woman lifting herself up
out of bed with her voice fed up...
She could have been saying my name,
the way it woke me.
A FINE LINE THAT SCREAMS:
Prison Poetry Anthology
Endless Mountains Review, 1992
Craig Czury, Editor
OBIT HOTEL
Pine Press, 1993. 35 pages,
Paperback, Machine-Stitched Binding
From Obit Hotel
Misery
i have grown
to collect you a long time
burning in a pool of salt
like winter
you rise without your gown
i cup my hand
we drink from the same face
A Small Sampling of Titles In Translation
With Enormous Thanks to The Translators and Editors!
TECHNOLOGIA NORTEAMERICANA: Patente en Tramite
ArbolAnimal Editiones,
Buenos Aires, Argentina. Paperback
No. 4 in the Series: COLECCION el ULTIMO POETA (Collection of the Ultimate Poets)
The series features by 15 premier poets, including Raymond Carver, Charles Butkowski, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Bob Dylan, Janice Joplin, Alan Ginsberg, John Lennon and others.
Spanish Translation by Esteban Moore
INQUIRE ABOUT AVAILABILITY - Email Craig
LA COCINA DE RESOLUCÍON DE CONFLICTOS (Version Bilingue)
ArbolAnimal Editiones, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2012. 56 pages, Paperback
From La Cocina de Resolucion de Conflictos
Podria llamar a este pequeno hilo de aire un refugio, un asilo incluso, pero el equipaje para el regreso siempre es mas pesado y siempre casi. Casi puedo acer que conversemos a la hora de la cena.
------------------------------------------------------
I could call this small strand of air a retreat, asylum even, but what's packed for the return is always heavier and always almost. I can almost bring you into conversation at the dinner table.
Bi-Lingual Edition (translated by Esteban Charpentier y Griselda Garcia)
SHADOW/ORPHAN SHADOW
SOMBRA/SOMBRA HUERFANA
(Bi-Lingual Edition)
Pine Press, 1996. 32 pages
Paperback, Machine-Stitched Binding
From Shadow Orphan Shadow
when I take the leap
will my shadow take the leap
as an act of love
and grow wider on the ground
when I fly to get a better view
Bi-Lingual Edition - Spanish/English
(Spanish version by Roseann DeCandido Kamin & Alicia Partnoy)
AMERICAN KNOW-HOW --
IN ATTESA DI BREVETTO
(Patent Pending)
Edizione Empiria, Rome, Italy, 2003
Paperback, Flat Spine
From American Know-How: Patent Pending
American Know-How: #00119
write a poem on the back of a kite
fly it as high as you can
ask a passerby to hold the string
just a minute
you have to go to the bathroom
you'll be right back
never come back.
Bi-Lingual Edition, Italian/English
(Translated into Italian by Riccardo Duranti, illustrated by Dino Patane)
KAM FRIKË TA THEM
(I'M AFRAID TO SAY)
International Literary Manifestation, Tetova, Macedonia, 2006. 30 pages, Paperback
From Ka Frike Ta Them | I'm Afraid To Say:
where did i go when you called my name
into which undertone did i sink
as if hidden in secret or in a dark mist
long ago you asked me a question
now i'm beginning to imagine
and as before you can't find me
PARALLEL´NOYE TECHNIE / PARALLEL RIVERTIME
Petropol Press, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1999. Chapbook, Paperback
Excerpt from book
if it were as simple
as tiny wheels
system of pulleys
to alleviate the weight
each word a galaxy of moons
absorbed in their own light
crucifix of tides
in an election year
at the school board meeting
in those giddy moments of talk
after love
skin would not sound like stone
Bi-Lingual Edition: Russian/English
(translated into Russian by Irina Mashinskaia)
NON PENSARE AI CAMION
Never Mind the Trucks
Crema Italy, 2016
102 pages, Paperback with Tranlator's Notes
Italian Version of Thumb Notes Almanac: Hitchhiking the Marcellus Shale
(Italian version by Aldo Villagrossi)
This is the eagerly anticipated collection of new "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 the region. 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.
Italian Version by Aldo Villagrossi
Contains translation notes
INQUIRE ABOUT AVAILABILITY - Email Craig
ESTAR EN EL LIMBO
Standing in the Ether
UNAP - Universidad Arturo Prat
Iquique, Chile, 2023. Paperback
A project of UNAP (Universidad Arturo Prat) in Iquique, Chile, during Czury's time as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to the University. Translated by the students of the English-Spanish-English Translation program Melanie Campos, Valentina Quezada, Paula Guerrero, Lía Muñoz, and Robert Bugueño, the work "Estar en el Limbo" (Standing in the Ether) marks a milestone and opens new perspectives for young people in this career field. A work of over 2 years in the making - see details below.
Faculty Directors of The Project:
Faculty of Human Sciences, Carolina Astudillo and the English–Spanish–English Translation Program, Claudio Vera.
Preface by academician Hernán Pereira.
READ ABOUT THE PROJECT HERE
DNEVNIK BEZ IMENA
Diary Without Names
(Bi-Lingual Edition)
Literature Live, Zagreb, Croatia, 2003
Chapbook, Paperback
From Dnevnik Bez Imena
the dead have no boundaries
no borders
the dead carry no flags
how can the spirit when released
have nationality
what language
does the disembodied soul speak
Bi-Lingual Edition - Croatian/English
Croatian tranlations by Milos Durdevic
INQUIRE ABOUT AVAILABILITY - Email Craig