Invited to the Feast

“Do not hurry your journey,” the poet says midway through this stunning collection. “Better if it lasts for years, so you arrive / laden with all you’ve lost along the way.” Bonnie Naradzay’s journey-as mother, professional, teacher, and longtime volunteer, leading poetry sessions in prisons, a retirement community, and among the homeless-has gathered much of both the lost and found, culminating in the publication of Invited to the Feast, a collection of poems and literary debut coming in her eightieth year.

With wisdom gleaned over time and craft honed over decades, Naradzay presents us with poems that range from dank encampments under city bridges to windswept Irish cliffs and Venetian vistas, finding a common human thread in street talk and the classic tropes of myth and our shared literary heritage.

Invited to the Feast is divided into three sections, each beginning with an epigraph that serves as a guide to reading each part. The poems collected here immerse the reader in the experience of interactive poetry classes, laments for mentors and family members who have gone, and far-flung travels. Free verse consorts with a diversity of forms, including the villanelle, ghazal, pantoum, sestina, and a poem in quatrains with the syllable count of sapphics.

Throughout this collection we sense that, despite loss and brokenness, love is still possible, and every one of us has been invited to this feast.

Author Biography

For years, Bonnie Naradzay has been leading weekly poetry sessions in downtown Washington, DC, and also at a retirement community. Her poems here include those experiences. Her earliest influence was Robert Lowell’s poetry; while at Harvard she attended his class on “The King James Bible as English Literature.” In 2010 she was awarded the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize.