Tracks in Snow by Thaddeus Rutkowski

Tracks in Snow is a collection of short, lyric poems inspired by the author’s life. Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up as a biracial child in northern Appalachia and later moved to New York City, where he lives now. These candid, compact poems focus on themes of alienation and belonging, closeness to nature, eventual parenthood, and aging. Each poem contains careful observation of detail—the flapping of a bird’s wing, the sound of a mantra, the smell of smoldering charcoal briquettes—and a conceptual twist that casts new light on the subject. #poetry #autobiography #biracial #Appalachia #New York

Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Cornell University and the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of eight previous books, most recently Safe Colors: A Novel in Short Fictions. His previous books include two poetry collections, Border Crossings and Tricks of Light. His novel Haywire won the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s members’ choice award, and his memoir Guess and Check won an Electronic Literature award for multicultural fiction. He teaches at Medgar Evers College/City University of New York and at a YMCA, and is a thesis reader for the fiction MFA program at Columbia University. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Best Small Fictions award. He has been a resident writer at Yaddo, MacDowell and other colonies, and has been a sponsored reader in Berlin, Hong Kong and Singapore. He lives with his wife in Manhattan.

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

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 “it might 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