The themes of The Moon Over the Cross Bronx Expressway, N.G. Haiduck’s first poetry collection, are hardship and heartache, love and beauty found in the Bronx—under “the same bright moon that surveys lovers’ lanes in Indiana.” The Cross Bronx Expressway cuts across the Bronx like a scar. It is the main artery, congested, clamorous, connecting neighborhoods and people to each other, to the rest of the city, to the rest of the nation—and beyond. “I have met people from the Bronx in an elevator in Paris, in a ramen restaurant in Tokyo, in a jazz club in Lima, and in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, says Haiduck. “These poems are about people.” #poetry #TheBronx #NYC #CrossBronxExpressway #BronxLife #Moon #FLP
N.G. Haiduck published her first book, Cabbie, with Finishing Line Press, in 2025. That collection of short stories recounts her adventures as a yellow cab driver in New York City in the early 1970s. Sheis the recipient of the BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Janice Farrell Poetry Prize from the National League of American Pen Women, and the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing from The City College of New York, where she taught for many years and was honored with the Teacher of the Year Award. Publications include Aeolian Harp Anthology, Flying South, Hanging Loose, The Naugatuck Literary Review, Paterson Literary Review, and The Prairie Home Companion, and her self-published mini-chapbook, Selling the Classifieds: 12 Sonnets. She now lives in Burlington, Vermont.
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“THE POEMS in Moon Over the Cross-Bronx Expressway walk the edge between despair and joy in modern urban life, seized in all its details. N.G. Haiduck shows a keen eye for the less than obvious, a discreet empathy for people that takes the form of observation, listening, and a sense of place as significant and specific. Haiduck’s “place” is the Bronx, its streets and waterways, the highway landlines connecting it to the rest of the city and beyond, and the strata of decades lived there as a young and less young woman, lover, mother, jazz buff, distiller of stories and memories, embodied in pain as in joy. Like another jazz-loving poet, Hayden Carruth, Haiduck is equally comfortable with a supple, short-lined free verse, with ballad stanzas, with the sonnet as a narrative vehicle. Like him too, she is aware, and makes her readers aware, that each recorded observation, each lyric transformation, is our collective and cultural history. This is the work of a mature woman who is at the same time a young poet, whom the reader can feel stretching and succeeding just as the speaker of one poem succeeds finishing that last lap at the gym. We have the assurance of that experience, and the excitement of that next stretch.”
–Marilyn Hacker
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