Glen A. Mazis

By: Glen A. Mazis

The River Bends in Time ($15, ISBN: 978-1-937536-23-7, Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68114-167-1, LCCN: 2012933922, 110pp, 6X9, April 2012 – Click to Purchase): follows the flow of time and the river as it unwinds in a small town in Pennsylvania along the banks of the Susquehanna. The narrator experiences those quiet moments of joy when ducks come from the sky to skim the water’s edge or in the height of a Nor’easter as he walks through the forest filling with snow, but also the sadness of a neighbor’s dying or love breaking apart. The river flows, always bending and changing, like discovering the love of a mate that  one joins with, becoming partners who run together under flying snow geese or dig a pond behind a two hundred year old house. Yet, the postmodern world seems lost without a past. A bout with colon cancer brings a renewed sense of the preciousness of each day and how the culture is wrong in its headlong race towards the future. The book ends with moments that resonate with the past in a state of continual affirming discovery.

*Pushcart Prize Nominee for 2012

Glen A. Mazis teaches philosophy and humanities at Penn State Harrisburg where he is Full Professor and has directed the interdisciplinary Master’s program. His poetry has been published in several literary journals, including Rosebud, The North American Review, Sou’wester, Spoon River Poetry Review, Willow Review, The Atlanta Review and Ashville Poetry Review (best of 1994-2004). He also writes books of cultural critique and philosophy, including Earthbodies (SUNY, 2002) and his newest book, Humans, Animals, Machines: Blurring Boundaries (SUNY, 2008).  Mazis’s poetic credits include being a chapbook finalist for White Eagle Coffee Store Press, and a finalist in competitions for a Writers At Work Fellowship, and the White Pine Press and Spire Press Book Prizes. He has 75 poems accepted for publication in past 12 years in 38 journals with poems also appearing in Many Mountains Moving, Ellipsis, Cumberland Poetry Review, Willow Review, River Oak Review, Crab Creek Review, Connecticut River Review, Worcester Review, Poet’s Guild, Wisconsin Review, and Writer’s Forum.

“For decades, Glen Mazis has been a reliable literary witness, perfecting these remarkable poems as evidence of his exquisite and graceful observations. A poem has to be capable of anything, “a religion without hope,” said Cocteau, and the beautiful accidents of poetry occur from searching in the dark, always alone, where we are not perceived but received, so that the final musical structures and equations are invisible and seamless, soaking down into the darkness of its reader, unimpeded by analysis. Even now, these remarkable poems are nosing around in the ether, looking for the readers they were meant to inhabit. Poetry is the last passable wilderness for language, because just as we poets are an immense minority, we are also invisible to the giants of industry, who believe the mountain is the only master, and that all action flows around it. Mazis shows us the invisible markers of our daily pilgrimage, in a language wise and sonorous at once. He has spent the time to become a valued “priest of the invisible,” and is still at his post, his clarion call is still resounding and it is ageless. No matter that all the cultural markers continue to undergo their tremendous seismic shifts, the poetry of The River Bends In Time will continue to widen in influence, continue to flow and be fiercely alive. This poetry is essential and will continue to come to the party, however unexpected, sometimes in disguise.”

—Keith Flynn (Founding and Managing Editor of THE ASHEVILLE POETRY REVIEW, author of The Golden Ratio, The Lost Sea, The Book of Monsters and other books of poetry and criticism)

“Glen Mazis’s poems are deeply attentive to the world and to its humans. His poems are filled with “electrical veins”, though not the same kind that appear in his moving elegy for a friend and neighbor.” –Thomas Lux

—Thomas Lux’s books of poetry include God Particles: Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 2008); The Cradle Place (2004); The Street of Clocks (2001); New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995 (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems, 1970-1975 (1996); Split Horizon (1994), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pecked to Death by Swans (1993); A Boat in the Forest (1992); The Drowned River: New Poems (1990); Half Promised Land (1986); Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy (1983); Massachusetts (1981); Like a Wide Anvil from the Moon the Light (1980); Sunday (1979); Madrigal on the Way Home (1977); The Glassblower’s Breath (1976); Memory’s Handgrenade (1972); and The Land Sighted (1970).