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ABOUT DAY STRYKb

Dan Stryk’s poems and prose parables have appeared in a variety of literary and cultural journals, including Triquarterly, Southwestern Review, Poetry Northwest, Western Humanities Review, Missouri Review, Chariton Review, Commonweal, The Hollins Critic, Asheville Poetry Review, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Among other anthologies, his work has been included in A Year in Poetry (Crown Publishers, 1995), Terra Nova’s first annual nature volume, Writing on Water (MIT Press, 2000), and Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia (UVA Press, 2002).

Dan Stryk’s earlier books includeTo Make a Life, The Artist and the Crow, Lives, A Sea Change, and the combined volume of poems and prose parables, Death of a Sunflower.

A lover of cultural diversity, the poet has lived and traveled in various parts of the world, including Japan, Iran, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Scotland—while often residing in London, England, where he was born. After spending much of his settled life in the Midwestern heartland of Illinois, Dan now lives in Bristol, Virginia, with his wife, the artist Suzanne Stryk (cover illustrator of this collection). He is currently a Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Virginia Intermont College.

Taping Images to Walls
Dan Stryk

$11.00
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ISBN: 1-931247-04-8

Taping Images to Walls is an experiment in connecting both daily and universal observations into the condensed shape of the informal sonnet, like a “small works” art exhibit of light and serious moments. “Snakeskin” is a fine example of what Dan Stryk accomplishes in his work with the sonnet structure:

Snakeskin

Twisted among goosefeathers and wild grasses
By the lakeside, in the muted life-buzz
Of late August sun, transmuting glassy scales
To blood-lit diamonds where I come upon it on
My altered evening walk. I’ve come to gather
Feathers, on a whim, to line the fading
Headdress of a haunting Cayman mask
Weathering, for years, upon my wall. But find
As well, queerly intact, this vacant brittle
Cowl. Stranger than art. And more remote.
I take it home, pointed tail uncoiling up to
Its hollow eyes. Stare at it, with wine, deep
Into night. Dreaming that I enter it, to clamber
Out, in ruby dawn, my weary life transformed.

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