Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota). Zachary Welter Czaia
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“Zach Czaia lays this first collection of poems as one would psalms on the altar of the world. Like a tattoo artist, he etches fine ink cuts onto our thinned skin, leaving memories that cannot be erased. Czaia takes us from classroom to church seamlessly in an American voice, in a Catholic voice, tracking both his personal history and pointing us from what we know to what we sanctify. His ‘Father X’ poems join a genre of indictment against those—named, nameless, and name withheld—who abuse sacred trust, leaving scars on human dignity and on the body of Christ. Have faith in these poems. They have a destination. Follow the bright notes of the trumpet. You will not be disappointed.”
—Rose Marie Berger poetry editor, Sojourners magazine
“In Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota) Zach Czaia offers readers a collection of marvels and the miraculous. In these poems, St. Paul ponders bicycles, the tongue of Blake’s tiger ‘drips oil/for our benedictions,’ and the ferryman, Charon, reflects on the generations that have passed through his boat. Dante and Beatrice make appearances in a book that celebrates the lush beauty of the Catholic Mass at the same time as it excoriates, as did the prophets, the corruption of religious authorities. Czaia honestly faces the pitiless sexual abuse scandals of the Church in poems that probe the nature and possibility of forgiveness and peace. The poet’s Jonah, who wants ‘a bigger, badder God,’ would be well-pleased with these brave and beautiful poems of faith, anger, sin, and love. As one poem ends, ‘May I return tenfold/what he has given me.’ You will be blessed tenfold by reading this book.”
—Anya Krugovoy Silver poet, author of I Watched You Disappear and The 93rd Name of God
“Beautifully made in an impressive wide range of forms, Zach Czaia’s poems deliver the complex thoughtful interior of a young man with tough honesty. Emerging from a deep religious faith, they accomplish the difficult task of not being limited by a specific faith. They speak to everyone who grapples with the joys and hurts, ecstasies and betrayals, to be had living as part of a family, school, romance, church, and city. Czaia speaks directly, a companion on the journey: ‘I want a baby’s heart and skin but not his tears,’ shines with tenderness, vulnerability and truth. And again: ‘I move from ease to unease/ easily within the hour, many times." And again, understood from Dante: ‘You know you are a little bit different today, but so are they different each day.’ The wealth of poets’ work that walks side by side with the language and wisdom of the Holy Bible will bring the delight of recognition of the universal and timeless to lovers of poetry as well as those new to it—whoever seeks a clear view of our daily travels.”
—Rosemary Winslow poet, author of Green Bodies
“Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota) is unusual for a first book in its range of subject matter as well as its emotional range. The book is also ambitious in the best sense of that word; it is not afraid to take on the ways in which the world can betray us. It is timely in its concerns and timeless in its longings for love, for beauty, for forgiveness and, most of all, for grace. Zach Czaia finds that grace through the act of writing poems and in language itself. The poet says about one of the characters in a poem: ‘That is the way with words for him now,/they are like that, small means of grace.’ Czaia could, of course, have written this about himself. And we, his readers, are able to experience that same grace ourselves thanks to these courageous poems.”
—Jim Moore poet, author of Underground: New & Selected Poems
“Finally! A book of poetry which freely, critically, and painfully—yet always with a craftsman’s attention to detail—enacts the Catholic Conscience in our fractured time. Read this book to find its title confirmed in poem after poem.”
—Peter Cooley Senior Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Director of Creative Writing, Tulane University; Poetry Editor, Christianity and Literature, Poet Laureate, Louisiana
Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota)
Zach Czaia
Foreword by Deborah Keenan
Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota)
Copyright © 2015 Zach Czaia. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-3228-9
EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-3229-6
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following previously published poems:
W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939.” Reprinted with the permission of Penguin Random House LLC, from Collected Poems by W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson.
Dylan Thomas, “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, from Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas (United States) and David Higham Associates (United Kingdom).
And sincere thanks to artist Cheng-Khee Chee for giving permission to use his beautiful painting, Saint Paul Cathedral (1978) as the cover art for the book.
Foreword
How does a poet invite readers into a new collection of poems? And how does a person writing a foreword tell readers to come into this book, stay for a while, get to know this particular narrator? Zach Czaia’s first book, Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota) begins with flesh, and accidents, with memory and touch. We begin inside ordinary life, carefully observed and remembered, then quickly we are considering Paul from the Bible, and just as quickly, Charon the Boatman, and Dante, and then Father X—with this wrenching image: “always Father X with his breath in the morning,/like an animal had lain overnight in his mouth and died/and death poured out of his mouth along with the gospel.”
We meet a narrator who’s so sharp, so observant, and so willing to reveal his vulnerabilities. In love, he stands in his bath towel, in front of the one he loves, and thinks: “I don’t want to die yet./ I don’t want to cry around you./ I don’t want to be a baby./ I want a baby’s heart and skin but not his tears./I press my face up to yours/and tremble.” This moves me. In its tenderness, it moves me, but also I was surprised to arrive at these lines, and I love when a poet surprises me, makes me see the world differently for a moment.
In this collection Zach Czaia achieves what we hope for as readers of poetry—that we can enter the book and want to stay, that we want to know what else this poet has seen and heard, learned and judged, read and dreamed. We turn the page and see his brilliant poems about his life as a teacher of high school students, see such honesty and true reflection about what it means to try to truly engage with these young people, what it means to stay authentic inside the force fields of students’ hopes and fears, their suffering, their judgements about school and books and their lives and their teacher, whether in Minneapolis or Belize. In his poem, “Memory From My Year of Substitute Teaching in Minneapolis Public,” Czaia writes: “They started throwing dictionaries./ I said, thinking it a good thing to say,/When I taught in Belize, my students had/little to nothing but they appreciated their education./My students in Minneapolis did not appreciate/being compared to Belizeans. Some sucked their teeth./More dictionaries were thrown./There is no satisfying conclusion to this story. . .”
He writes poems about how we seek and reject wisdom, about Blake and tigers, and God’s power, about Bible stories and their hold on some of us, and about Milton and Auden, about corruption and suffering in his church, and about priests and teachers, truths and cover-ups. He writes about family and about deep, true, longed-for