Where We Went Through by Nancy Nowak

 

Nancy Nowak’s Where We Went Through is a devastating sequence of poems, lit with beauty, and raw with the devastation of all her familiar loves. She offers a form of personal ekphrastic as two intimates enter inside the paintings they adore, inhabiting light spaces that define their entwined vision and care for the world. “Alight together,” the solace discovered in art and their wonderment is a form of love and speaks to “how they renew/ beyond ending. The painter /trusted…”  When fire and flood devastate their landscape, the meanings do not founder but change, even as “as we might try/ to shape and keep what is/already changing.” The poet then documents sudden disease, and the toll, as the hard passage begins, when “ruin invisible” becomes “breath less possible.” The beloved will be lost.

 

The exquisite poem, “Betrayals” outlines the senses robbed where “sound became stone,” and the very air breathed, heartlessly choked with cinders from the fires. Nowak’s witness is tough and delicate as the black widow’s web and the red hourglass on her belly reminds us what’s ahead. The why floats, unanswered, an end word in lower case. Destructive elements, unbalanced, bear down on our signature spaces: intimates without protection, no words for ending. The poet dissembles the distance between worlds. The possibility of waking in wonder remains true, because nothing is denied. Nowak carries through to name “ever after” and “ruin” as a truthful chorus for our time in this poignant song. I was rapt absorbing the fevered consequence of Where We Went Through.

–Beatrix Gates author of Dos (Finishing Line Press)(The Burning Key, New & Selected Poems, 1973-2023)

 

“An intimate memoir constructed out of concise, finely detailed poems–like snapshots of the world experienced by two people seeing the world together: some as delicate as watercolors, others as deep as X-rays. When one person passes, it’s devastating. This is a stunning book–in all meanings of the word.”

–Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters

 

 

“It’s rare to find a book of poetry where every line feels absolutely necessary to the poem and every poem is absolutely placed in the right order, essential to the book as a whole. This is what I gratefully found reading Nancy Nowak’s masterful chapbook, “Where We Went Through,” which tells her story of becoming a widow.

 

Wandering through catacombs, exposed to blizzards, deserts and tsunamis, Nancy joins the exterior natural world as the poems guide us into her internal landscape, building momentum and landing square in the ecology of her grief.

 

Casually intimate moments of her marriage—a trip they made to a lake or both giggling as they sneaked a six pack of beer onto a train, feel fully alive as we learn how easy they were together, how playful and how totally oblivious of what was to come.

 

As what she didn’t know then is reinterpreted in the present, I found myself right next to her, overpowered by how out of control we are in each tiny moment of our tiny lives.

 

I have admired Nancy’s poetry for more than 30 years, how her voice flows with the extraordinary range of her knowledge and stunned by the precise and lush musicality of her language. Without thinking about it, I found myself reading these poems out loud as another way to appreciate her talent. Yet, these intellectual pleasures never obscured the raw anguish of her loss and how deeply it resonated in each poem.

 

This is a rich book, multi-layered and textured, and I will go back to these poems again, considering how Nancy, as her cat sleeps on her lap, finds a peace that only comes after the worst that can happen has happened, and there is nothing left to fear.”

–Sharyn Wolf, psychotherapist, author of Love Shrinks