Overview

""This book sees all. Not everything, but all. There's a difference."" --John Lee Clark, author of How to Communicate In Ironhood, the acclaimed poet Raymond Luczak recalls the neighbors and shopkeepers he once knew while growing up in Ironwood, Michigan during the 1970s and 1980s. They included a scruffy man who smoked cheap cigars while tending to his fragrant backyard garden, a cat-eyed woman who stood watch over a sea of typewriters, a bald jeweler whose dexterous fingers repaired a watch's minuscule innards, and tired cashiers in red smocks who dreamed at the western edge of town. ""These poems are an antidote to the language of shallow tourist marketing and cartoonish outlander stereotypes that so often seem to define Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a place much mythologized, but seldom seen and understood with any clarity of vision."" --M. Bartley Seigel, author of In the Bone-Cracking Cold ""We meet the shops, landscape, and people of a working-class Iron Range town barely touched by waves of the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s. What emerges is an incisive exploration of growing up in a small town, where one can be suffocatingly known and intimately estranged at the same time."" --Emily Van Kley, author of The Cold and the Rust RAYMOND LUCZAK is the author and editor of 38 books, including Animals Out-There W-i-l-d, once upon a twin, and Compassion, Michigan. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Reviews

""Raymond Luczak is not a man of the world; rather, he is a man of many worlds, a member of diverse and intersecting communities as well as a relentless creator in many genres and forms. Despite such varied enticements from elsewhere, he returns again and again to the small town of his childhood and to the art of poetry, both for good reason. Writers as disparate as Willa Cather and G. K. Chesterton knew well that the most local contains the most world, the most poetry. It's no accident that Ironhood opens with a consideration of what aliens from outer space will find in Ironwood, Michigan, or that this beautifully wrought elegy closes with 'the comet of Sign' shooting 'farther than the sun' within the poet's eye. The pages that dance between the two heavenward gestures shiver with minute detail--a specific bump along a path, the exact hue of a classmate's shirt. This book sees all. Not everything, but all. There's a difference."" --John Lee Clark, author of How to Communicate ""In Ironhood, Raymond Luczak reincarnates his hometown Ironwood in Michigan's Upper Peninsula as he knew it before leaving for college at 18. The town serves as a backdrop to the dramatic narrative he scripts, a memoir, himself protagonist. Deaf, rejected, he longs for visibility among those who erase him: class bullies, teachers, townspeople, members of his own family, even his mother, who goes to the grave unable to accept a gay son. One of nine children, Luczak longs for but can never afford even small things, such as a 45-rpm single from Casey Kasem's American Top 40. Loneliness, privation, his sense of feeling acted upon, make all the more poignant his remarkable transition from dismissed child to poet 'blessed with the power to defy and electrify.' I found myself rereading Ironhood, wanting to savor Luczak's writing, how verbs punch, metaphors stun, and rhetoric runs down the page without a glitch. I found myself wanting this deeply moving book never to end."" --Beverly Matherne, U.P. Poet Laureate and author of Potions d'amour, thés, incantations / Love Potions, Teas, Incantations ""Despite its one-word title, this book offers twin portraits, both of which enhance the other. Through the meticulous observations of our speaker, a Deaf gay kid who finds himself an 'alien trapped in nocturnes' 'ricochet[ing] from one streetlamp to another, ' we meet the shops, landscape, and people of a working-class Iron Range town barely touched by waves of the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s. What emerges is an incisive exploration of growing up in a small town, where one can be suffocatingly known and intimately estranged at the same time. From dentists to family members to clerks at the local Pamida, Raymond Luczak offers the gift of his unflinching attention, finding 'us humans quite peculiar, ' but always worthy of having our stories told."" --Emily Van Kley, author of The Cold and the Rust ""It's not that there aren't other people writing about Michigan's Upper Peninsula, but that so few of them climb into the marrow of the place with such thorough and intimate abandonment as Raymond Luczak in his newest collection, Ironhood. These poems are a deep dive, and an antidote to the language of shallow tourist marketing and cartoonish outlander stereotypes that so often seem to define a place much mythologized, but seldom seen and understood with any clarity of vision. After reading Luczak's poems, his landscapes, character studies, and reminiscences, it's hard not to feel like you've lived in and loved in Ironwood yourself, so complex and insightful was the experience."" --M. Bartley Seigel, former U.P. Poet Laureate and author of In the Bone-Cracking Cold

Author Information

Raymond Luczak grew up deaf while spending nine years each in Ironwood and Houghton, Michigan before moving away for college. He is the author and editor of 38 titles, including a number that detail his experiences in the Upper Peninsula. Such books include ""Chlorophyll: Poems about Michigan's Upper Peninsula"", ""Far from Atlantis: Poems"", and ""Compassion, Michigan: The Ironwood Stories"". Two of his collections ""once upon a twin: poems"" and ""Animals Out-There W-i-l-d: A Bestiary in English and ASL Gloss"" were selected as a Top Ten U.P. Notable Book of the Year for 2021 and 2024 respectively. His work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. An inaugural Zoeglossia Poetry Fellow, Luczak lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [raymondluczak.com]

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