All Things Dusk

Winner of the Hong Kong University International Poetry Prize 2014

Z.G. Tomaszewski is a rambler, fisherman, poet, and musician currently living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tomaszewski has resided in Vermont, Montana, and Ireland, working in various fields: farmer, mechanic, maintenance man, chocolatier, bookseller, and is a founding producer of Lamp Light Musical Festival and co-founder of Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters.

“These visionary poems suggest that every world is manifold worlds, that mundane experience is saturated with the sacred if we practice using the heart’s and soul’s eyes to look and see. In this book, the world is measured by the heart’s scale and the soul’s rule, and the result is a beautiful human singing.” —Li-Young Lee, final judge of the HKU International Poetry Prize 2014

“Reading Z.G. Tomaszewski’s All Things Dusk is to be re-united with every universe and atom of existence. These lyrical prayers emerge from when, as the poet writes, ‘the self is still.’ In Tomaszewski’s vision of a shattered Eden, there is transcendence of and immersion in all that is with us. The paradoxes comfort, sustain, and restore awe’s truth.” —Jack Ridl, author of Broken Symmetry (recipient of the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry), Losing Season, and Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (chosen for the poetry gold medal by Foreword Reviews)

“Bravely opening with a poem titled ‘The Soul,’ Z.G. Tomaszewski then gives us a rural landscape where pond, dragonfly, a bat’s wing, a mountain are transformed, made new with the magic of his imagery. Here is the mark of a true poet, who sees the Big Bang in a chrysanthemum stone, wants to become the coyote’s howl, the seed in the pine cone, to pinch light from a darkness even as he also wants this darkness. All Things Dusk is an extraordinary, timeless work.” —Patricia Fargnoli, author of Winter and Then, Something