Invited to the Feast

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(10 10 9 1)>Do not hurry your journey the poet says midway through this stunning collection. Better if it lasts for years so you arrive / laden with all you've lost along the way. Bonnie Naradzay's journey-as mother professional teacher and longtime volunteer leading poetry sessions in prisons a retirement community and among the homeless-has gathered much of both the lost and found culminating in the publication of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(10 10 9 1)>Invited to the Feast</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(10 10 9 1)> a collection of poems and literary debut coming in her eightieth year.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(10 10 9 1)>With wisdom gleaned over time and craft honed over decades Naradzay presents us with poems that range from dank encampments under city bridges to windswept Irish cliffs and Venetian vistas finding a common human thread in street talk and the classic tropes of myth and our shared literary heritage.</span></p><p></p><p><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(10 10 9 1)>Invited to the Feast </em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(10 10 9 1)>is divided into three sections each beginning with an epigraph that serves as a guide to reading each part. The poems collected here immerse the reader in the experience of interactive poetry classes laments for mentors and family members who have gone and far-flung travels. Free verse consorts with a diversity of forms including the villanelle ghazal pantoum sestina and a poem in quatrains with the syllable count of sapphics.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(10 10 9 1)>Throughout this collection we sense that despite loss and brokenness love is still possible and every one of us has been invited to this feast.</span></p><p></p>