Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania. He is the author of eight previous books of prose and poetry, most recently Safe Colors: A Novel in Short Fictions. His novel Haywire won the members’ choice award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He teaches at Medgar Evers College/City University of New York and at a YMCA. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Best Small Fictions award.
PRAISE
The poems of Tracks in Snow follow the intoxications of city living, its binding spells that have Thaddeus Rutkowski‘s persona speculating, “Maybe we were tipsy enough / not to care if we lived or died.” But live he does, Chaplinesque, observing and acting in sympathy with his fellow citizens, the consummate bardic participant-observer, observing everything from trees to the inadequacy of ethnic labels. Rutkowski’s poems are a resonant anthropology of New York in images and scenes he allows to breathe. He is a generous, playful poet who asks us to meditate with him, on the quiet moments of a frenetic polis, because“itmight help clear the mind, / relax the spirit, / bring hope where there was none.”
–George Guida, author of The Uniform
In Tracks in Snow by Thaddeus Rutkowski, you can find a refreshing escape from the chaos of our world and dive into the enchanting beauty of a quirky, simpler life.
–Nancy Mercado, American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement
This is a book of sights and sounds, visions and vestiges, tracks (of course) and traces, clues and speculations, evidence and palimpsests. But also: meditations on meditation, on the extraordinary quotidian, on the anxiety of merely being with one’s self, on the infinite emptiness of an empty room. Reading Rutkowski’s words, looking through his eyes and hearing through his ears is an expansive, transcendent experience. I absolutely loved Tracks in Snow.
–John S. Hall, poet and author
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