"You warm yourself at the fire, but I stand in the fire" Jacopone da Todi wrote, invoking the "abyss" of spiritual love. Bonnie Naradzay's poems burn with a radical empathy that can leave her utterly defenseless and open the reader to a world of unbearable light. Anchored in a homeless shelter, a hospice, a county jail, anguished by the dangers that haunt loved ones, these poems are frighteningly vulnerable to the suffering they discover-never performative, never sheltering in aesthetic catharsis. Invited To The Feast is a searing book. But it leaves us with a frisson of wild hope.D. Nurkse, author of A Country of StrangersBonnie Naradzay's superior debut collection, Invited to the Feast, begins with a sequence of poems about the author's teaching at an inner city shelter-turned-poetry-banquet whose guests include Basho, Issa, Richard Wright, and Bede. With a deft and masterful hand, Naradzay excises ornamentation and sermonizing to reveal in each of these poems the nourishment that results when life is served to us in its purest extract. In these pages we observe not a product of suffering but a process of entanglement, of how to be of help, to be help itself-and the urgency of that calling in our times. Here, all the living and the dead may find a place at the table.David Keplinger, author of Ice, awarded the Rome PrizeThese poems, filled with good conscience and abundant soul, merge the everyday with images of otherness, where poems on travel rub shoulders with the author searching for clothespins to hang laundry on the line. Allusions to classical literature mingle with "abundant ripe fruit sucked on by bees" ("Picking Blackberries Near Bunratty"). Naradzay's juxtapositions are the very bones of metaphor, and it is work which she handles with artful precision in this wonderful book.John Minczeski, author of A Letter to Serafin

Publisher: Slant Books

Pub date: 2025-10-28

Length: 86 pages