“In Away Away, Mark Pawlak is a witness to the world passing by his window. What he sees there teaches its own specific wisdom, and it is also beautiful.”
Away Away
by Mark Pawlak
In his triumphant new poetry collection, Away Away, Mark Pawlak casts his precise and contemplative eye over the countryside of the American Northeast. A prolific and widely anthologized poet, Pawlak shifts in these poems from playful and witty to somber and sparse, all with an unerring attention to the details of natural beauty and the hum of everyday life. Across myriad landscapes and literary forms, Pawlak draws on the minimalist discipline and philosophies of classical Japanese poetry, and transforms modes of everyday writing, from government lockdown notices to checklists. This insightful collection, rich with allusion, brings us to a deeper understanding of our place in the world and our relationship to nature. Pawlak quotes Brassi: “If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.” In Away Away, Pawlak never falls into the trap of the ordinary, moving us instead continuously towards wonder.
…we are all still heading somewhere, whether in the physical landscape or through and beyond the pandemic crisis. We are moving in “incremental accumulations” that are comprised of childhood memories, places we’ve been, where we live, and where we are going next. Perhaps it is enough to say we are going Away Away.
~Carlene Gadapee, MicroLit
Mark Pawlak
Mark Pawlak is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Reconnaissance: New and Selected Poems and Poetic Journals, and the editor of six anthologies. His work has been translated into German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and has been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw. In English, his poems and prose have appeared widely in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals, and in the literary magazines New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann’s Review, and The World, among many others. His latest publication is the book-length memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov (MadHat Press, 2021). Pawlak lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is co-editor of Hanging Loose, one of the country’s longest lived and most influential literary presses.
