John Findura is the author of the poetry collection Submerged (Five Oaks Press, 2017). His poetry and criticism appear in numerous journals including Verse; Fourteen Hills; Copper Nickel; Pleiades; Forklift, Ohio; Sixth Finch; Prelude; and Rain Taxi. A guest blogger for The Best American Poetry, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife and two daughters. Socials: X, BSky, Insta @jfindura
PRAISE:
These wonderful poems tunnel through everyday life doggedly yet with a crooked grin. Along the way, reality unravels, weaves itself together, falls apart again. Witty and oddly moving, this book invites you to linger in its dream logic. Here melancholy flirts with absurdity, and the result is an opera, not one with dukes and varlets and castles in Italy, but a tale of ordinary life. You get the feeling that our keen-eyed author is telling his own story, reader, and then you realize he’s telling yours.
–David Kirby, author of The Winter Dance Party, Poems 1983-2023In The Only Map You’ll Need, John Findura charts a modern Darwinian road trip through the landscape of the self, exploring the complex disorderliness of the mind one pain at a time. These poems, humorous and strange, deceptively plainspoken and full of longing, translate the poet’s relentless compulsions into language capable of turning the world’s chaos into moments of clarity and resonance: “And I tell you, truthfully, because there is no / other way of telling you anything, that, yes, / everything hurts, even if you can’t see it.” Findura has given us a radiant atlas—we should study it closely.
–Joshua Poteat, author of The Regret Histories
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