In Ironhood, the acclaimed poet Raymond Luczak recalls the neighbors and shopkeepers he once knew while growing up in Ironwood, Michigan during the 1970s and 1980s. They included a scruffy man who smoked cheap cigars while tending to his fragrant backyard garden, a cat-eyed woman who stood watch over a sea of typewriters, a bald jeweler whose dexterous fingers repaired a watch’s minuscule innards, and tired cashiers in red smocks who dreamed at the
western edge of town.
Advance Praise
“This book sees all. Not everything, but all. There’s a difference.”
— John Lee Clark, author of How to Communicate
“Deaf and rejected, Luczak longs for visibility among those who erase him: class bullies, teachers, and even his mother, who goes to the grave unable to accept her gay son. I found myself rereading Ironhood, wanting to savor his writing.”
— Beverly Matherne, author of Potions d’amour, thés, incantations / Love Potions, Teas, Incantations
“It’s not that there aren’t other people writing about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but that so few of them climb into the marrow of the place with such thorough and intimate abandonment as Raymond Luczak in his newest collection, Ironhood. These poems are an antidote to the
language of shallow tourist marketing and cartoonish outlander stereotypes that so often seem to define a place much mythologized, but seldom seen and understood with any clarity of vision.”— M. Bartley Seigel, author of In the Bone-Cracking Cold
“How Late the Night”
