Deerbrook Editions

The Day
I Met
Ava Gardner

poetry by Alan Harawitz

ISBN: 978-0-9600293-6-5

78 pages; 6 x 9; $17.00

Available now

The poem Born Too Late read on The Writer's Almanac

Alan Harawitz has lived in southern Maine for almost ten years, having retired after more than 31 years as a social studies and language arts teacher in the New York City public school system. In the 1960s he wrote about his travels around the United States and Canada for Trailer Life magazine. Widely-published, Alan's poems have been in more than 100 publications including Rattle, Poet Lore, Hanging Loose, Fugue, Pivot, Open Spaces, Pearl, Roanoke Review, California Quarterly, Red Wheelbarrow and Main Street Rag, among others.

 

Alan Harawitz has that eye we think of as necessary for a writer, the eye that takes in the smallest of details, all the while fitting those details into a big picture. Harawitz plunges us into an intensely rich world of the ordinary. The reader gets honest portrayals of his life. It’s work you can trust. It is in these moments of the poem that Harawitz allows flashes of true grace that if we, as individuals, are lucky, will come to recognize and nurture in our own lives.

  —Stellasue Lee, Ph. D., Editor Emeritus Rattle, author of Queen of  Jacks, New & Selected Poems

Here is a friend to meet, a poet who captures the kind of thoughts that flash with fresh insight, heart currents out of that nether zone between conscious and unconscious as we drive along a long, open highway, walk the dog or find ourselves eavesdropping a diner booth just behind us. He catches the humor and pathos we miss, or fail to note, in the everyday, swept along as we are by one imposed or imagined urgency or another. In these poems Alan Harawitz grasps what matters, whether on the baseball diamond of Ebbets Field or in a New York delicatessen, not infrequently what we resist and most need.

  —Martin Steingesser, Inaugural Poet Laureate, Portland ME, 2007-09

“A blurb is a short promotional piece accompanying a creative work. It may be written by the author or publisher or quote praise from others.” (Wikipedia) I’m not the author. That’s Alan Harawitz. I’m not the publisher. That’s Deerbrook Editions. I’m not quoting from others. I’m praising. These poems will make you smile, chuckle, laugh out loud, and pause to ponder. Why? Because it’s all here. From the Brooklyn Dodgers to fly fishing in the Catskills. From James Dean to Jerry Seinfeld. From the March on Washington to Google. From a June wedding to a Florida funeral. From Al Jolson to Ava Gardner. Alan Harawitz spills his heart, his soul, his guts in these poems. With an eye for detail, an ear for speech, Harawitz spins his life in America, and as he tells us in “The Art of the Egg Cream,”  “. . . it might help,/ though it’s not absolutely necessary,/ if you’re Jewish.”

  —J.R. Solonche, author of Tomorrow, Today, and Yesterday