Conjoining

“This is risky subject matter. A less skillful poet might turn such material into freak show. But Czerwiec—both formally rigorous and empathetic—ensures that we are moved not horrified by the many kinds of monsters that can be birthed, that birth itself can be monstrous, and that motherhood can turn mothers into monstrosities.” – Jehanne Dubrow

You can read reviews of Conjoining here and here, and an interview about the project here. Excerpts include the title poem at storySouth, and “Fugue: Maternal Imagination” at Connotation Press’ Congeries.

A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster, and the Tragedy of P, His Parasitic Twin

This magical-realist narrative sequence of poems is based on the true story of the 18th-century Cantonese youth A-ké and set against the First Opium War with Britain. Before being included in Conjoining, it was published first as a chapbook with Dancing Girl Press. An excerpt appeared in TAB: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics.

Self-Portrait as Bettie Page

"These deft poems playfully pin up and seriously pin down the Bettie Page mystique and the performative and elusive subjectivity of female sexuality—as well as the complex relationships of subject to object, free to formal verse, and bodies au naturel to bodies in bondage." —Lee Ann Roripaugh

You can read “About the Author” and “Autobioerotic” at Tattoosday, and “Part & Parcel” at Verse Daily.

North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets (Ed. Heidi Czerwiec)

“The scope of the poets in this collection is as broad as the landscape itself, including work by Heid E. Erdrich, Mark Vinz, Debra Marquart, Ed Bok Lee, and North Dakota’s Poet Laureate Larry Woiwode. In writing about those who ache in this great expanse, these poems are about what connects us together as humans, poems that sing to each other across lines and pages and space, demonstrating that, as poet Thomas McGrath asserts in his Letter to an Imaginary Friend, North Dakota is everywhere.”