Red Rain by Edytta Wojnar

Born and raised in Poland, Edytta Wojnar received her MFA in Professional and Creative Writing from William Paterson University. The author of poetry collections Dandelions in Third Space, published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, and chapbooks Here and There and Stories Her Hands Tell, published by Finishing Line Press, Wojnar received a 2025 Individual Artist Finalist award from the NJ State Council on the Arts. Her work, nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Cagibi, CALYX, Glassworks, Lips, Lumina, Paterson Literary Review, SurVision, The Stillwater Review, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram @edyttaanna.

PRAISE:

 

The red rain in Edytta Wojnar’s new collection of poems appears in various guises: as the droplet of blood loosed by a slapped mosquito, as the raspberry-tinged Pellegrino that spills onto shorts, as flashing ambulance lights during the pandemic, as a miscarriage. Underscoring these poems’ often lush surfaces is a troubled marriage and the violence, both random and political, perpetrated against women. “Churchless” and sleepless, Wojnar still insists that “no psalm praises life // fuller than a chorus of wrens / on a spring morning.” Such joyful noise, such poetry, offers solace to us all.

–Michael Waters

 

Although the poems in Red Rain gaze unflinchingly into what Yeats called the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, they also manage, again and again, the lovely, crucial miracle of finding hope. There is a beguiling music in Wojnar’s work that draws us into understanding the wonderful ambiguities of living life most fully.

–George Bilgere

 

Red Rain holds us within spaces of in-betweenness where wounds and provisional delights tug at each other. Discreet in their vocabularies of sorrow and luminous in articulation, Edytta Wojnar’s poems move through sites of ambivalence, betrayal, disguise, silences and door thuds, but also lean into the night to listen how “rain plays cymbals on copper sills” or to watch “a bluebird fold its wings.” Pandemic, marriage, intimacy are tested for what they might reveal about resilience and the gift of being. How fortunate still, they seem to whisper, to have the tools and rituals of poetry join “the chorus of wrens” and the “wisps of clouds” to seek what sustains and consoles us.

–Mihaela Moscaliuc