Shameless Self-Promotion: The Astronaut’s Wife by Lorette C. Luzajic

A wise man once said that the only certainties in life were death and taxes. I figured it would be incredibly boring to write a poetry collection about taxes, so I went right for the jugular. I tempered the morbidity with love, that other madness. What kind of poet doesn’t include a few love poems?

This was the official marketing blurb: Love and death have been on this poet’s mind for some time. This poetry maps a few of her most intense experiences, accentuating the positive, the unusual, and the lost. With a unique voice and lively wit, a sardonic twist, strength, and a peculiar resolve through melancholy, these words lay bare her soul. Luzajic believes in exploring the frontiers of the universe, its chaos, its beauty, its small kindnesses, its remarkable spirit. Along the way on these adventures, you sometimes have to say goodbye.

If you are one of those rare gems who constantly reads poetry, you won’t want to miss the “rapier wit” in these poems that ring with “authenticity and truth”. (Hey, I didn’t say it! Those are two of hundreds of positive comments. Not all were positive. Some called my work self-indulgent. But Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, called them “imaginative, witty, and profound.” You decide!) Many of these poems were published in literary magazines like Modern Poetry, Caffeine, White Wall Review, Rattle, Grain, The Fiddlehead and so on. On top of all this, the book looks damn cool, too, thanks to the unbelievable artwork of Iaian Greenson (www.iaiangreenson.com).

If you never read poetry, take a chance on me and treat yourself to The Astronaut’s Wife. Join me in surprising adventures, and meet some characters you won’t forget. But hey, don’t take my word for it: here’s what other people have to say!

I get poetry from readers once in a while, but I never want to read it. Your book of poems is wonderful. I like the style very much. Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy. I like them and thank you for sending them. Looking forward to the next book.

Thomas Moore, bestselling author of Care of the Soul, Dark Nights of the Soul, and Soul Mates

“This Girl Can Write indeed! The Astronaut’s Wife – Poems of Eros and Thanatos establishes Lorette Luzajic as a rising, multi-talented poet on the Canadian scene. Her insights into the heights and depths of our common human struggle to live out our own often-buried divinity hold the ring of authenticity and truth. Weep, laugh, enjoy!”

Tom Harpur, bestselling author of The Pagan Christ and Would You Believe?

ORDERING INFORMATION: The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos by Lorette C. Luzajic through www.indigo.ca, www.amazon.com, or www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

We got the book. Thanks. I don’t know how to properly reciprocate when a writer puts that much of herself on the page. I’m not sure how to honour that. The book treads holy ground, sometimes with a holy rawness and sometimes with unholy eloquence. The last two stanzas enter a whole other realm.

Will Braun, editor, Geez Magazine, Winnipeg

Each time I feel that I’ve found a favourite poem, I turn the page to find myself tempted by another. Valium for Breakfast, A Poem for B and November keep on drawing me back for another read. Wonderful…powerful…thoughts that make me gasp out loud, laugh or blink back tears, all in a few words or stanzas. Thank you for sharing this beautiful gift with me.

Bonnie Staring, editor, www.womencandoanything.com

I am a great fan of your work. My friend used to go on and on about a line from one of your poems “the quiet raging ocean of my messed up heart” before I’d ever read it. He was actually the one that gave me your book. But I found so much beauty in your words, and I felt so inspired no matter how many times I read it. I appreciate so much what you’ve done and the way you felt…The depth in which you write is so amazing, it’s so much more than anything out there.

Through your writing I love the way you live, love the way you love, your heart is so truly unique. Reading your poems brings me the feeling I get on the days that I am in love with the world and I can feel everything.

My best friend in the entire world had the kind of beauty in his heart that I see in your poems, and it brings me back to the feeling that he gave me of someone who was meant for a better world. Unfortunately he died two years ago, and I think about your poems and other sorts of things that he would appreciate as well, and it’s so amazing. I haven’t been able to put it all into words. I would read your poems when I missed him or just felt like crying and it was sort of like a companionship like coffee and nicotine…..I don’t know if any of this makes sense, but I want to thank you for your inspiration.

Stephanie Nord, Georgia, x-ray technician

I n writing this book, the author has, like a rock through a mirror or a beer bottle on the sidewalk shattered her life. You read one of her poems and know exactly what she is writing about. Each is a part of the story of her existence.

She has experienced life like few others would dare. You picture the smells and sounds as well as the sights, but you do this shard by shard. The whole is made up of the shards, yet there is something both more and less to the ‘big picture’.

This is not really a book of poetry; it is more of a memoir. It sometimes uses a poetic form, but mostly not. A few of the poems are a little self-indulgent, but most of them have a brutal, scary honesty. I read this collection two months ago and only now understand what I think of it.

Alexander Burns, criminal lawyer, Burlington, Ontario

The Astronaut’s Wife is a complete lifetime of emotions all splashed helter-skelter across a few dozen pages by a woman who clearly understands them all. This clutch of lyrics seeks out your soul and enriches it with warm, peaceful feelings, and then rips it out with raw, unquenchable anguish. With mythic imagery and erotic undertone, the author carries you on a journey through her own experience of the unending pathos of life and death. Don’t miss it!

Stu Blyde, Threading Machine Set-up/Nipple Manufacturer, Zurich, Ontario

I knew when I was 20 years old that I was the best young writer in Canada, no – pardon me – the world. I felt this in my bones, in my marrow. I had a chip on my shoulder, greasy hair and a brand new Smith Corona on my desk. I even had a working title for the great Canadian novel I was about to write…

Suffice it to say that Lorette’s writing made me feel embarrassed by everything I had ever written. She was Jack Kerouac…I only had the cuffs of my jeans rolled up. Lorette was a blues record that I owned on CD… Novels, short stories, poetry…Lorette was the master of her domain…And I wouldn’t be lying if I told you that she was one of the people who taught me how to write.

Iaian Greenson, writer and artist, Toronto, Ontario

Few of us have had the horrid misfortune of experiencing the death of a multitude of friends, family and acquaintances at a young age. Even fewer have had the blessing and sometimes curse of encountering a lifetime of pivotal events by the time our odometer rolls past 30. Only one person has met and conquered both with the mastery, elegance and savoir-faire of the written word. This person is Lorette C. Luzajic. Lorette is of the most talented, diversified, and multi-faceted writers I have had the pleasure to read. The Astronaut’s Wife is a catharsis for all who have had to endure the loss of someone who has left this world too brave, too loved, and too young. This is a read for people like myself who often find ourselves having to ‘buck up’ when we really should be soaked in tears. It offers a confidant with whom you can find the emotions that need to be expressed, written in words that know you, sit beside you, and hold your hand as you move past pain. However, if you read closely, friends, you will find bits of rapier wit dancing below the surface of even the darkest lines. Also inside are poems that are an old friend reliving memories of times and places that perhaps you have also been to. If not before, Lorette takes you there now. Mainly, this is the kind of writing most aspire to, but never achieve. The Astronaut’s Wife reaches past heart and soul and into the place that you never reveal, sometimes even to yourself. I await Lorette’s next work and the further unveiling of this great talent to the world.

John Bennett, chef and restaurateur,Toronto

The author poignantly claims in one of these collected poems that she “looked straight into darkness to see a starry night.” Indeed, Lorette C. Luzajic has had some highs and lows and she bares them openly in The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Without lowering her gaze, she lets you look straight inside of her and you may flinch before she does.

The Astronaut’s Wife- a poetry book with one of the most amazing cover designs by painter Iaian Greenson – takes its title from a mediocre movie of the same title, but of appropriate melodrama and a good cast. Luzajic borrows to suit her whims frequently, not because she isn’t wholly original – she surely is – but because written, visual, musical and cinematic culture are mainstays of her palette in both her mixed media paintings and in her writing. Guest appearances from all walks of high and low culture may or may not be recognized by her readers, but add layers of depth at every turn. In this case, the title is a perfect fit in keeping with the poet’s grim and steady gaze into the dark skies in search of that Van Gogh-ian glory. Much of her work resonates with this balancing of dark and light, and here the intensity of irony and sorrow shines forth straight from the title. For the book is dedicated to her late husband, who lived the philosophy of psychonautism and then died from it. For the exploration of unknown frontiers can and does lead to death, but still the poet seeks in this collection to know them.

And if the borrowed cover title sums it all fittingly in the poet’s personal folklore, the last poem The Astronaut wraps it all up with a bit of an homage to Dylan Thomas. How dare you go so gently into that good night, she says last of all.

The journey through love and death is harrowing but an amazing resilience shines through creatively as the poet takes you into her psyche. She reveals the kind of betrayals in love that many of us have endured, prying apart their layers with intuition and wisdom. In Prison Blues, she laments the fall-out of a beautiful relationship ruined by control issues. “And yes it’s easy on a Sunday to miss you,” she admits, “the lonely chill of frosty daylight feels sentimental, and does not recall how we wrung each other into total emptiness.” She expresses her fears, wondering if anyone will ever “reach for me the way you reach for me.” Without holding onto anger, she acknowledges the possibility that no one’s “intention is to hurt another – love simply longs to possess another, to keep them with a jailer’s hands.”

Other works show a more cynical and bitter edge toward love and its “quiet scars and gaping maw” (Valium for Breakfast) but the poet still retains in these furious expressions a sardonic sense of humour. “Since you asked,” she writes, “I’ll tell you what has become of me…I’m fat, and work as a cashier, just as Satan promised me on Highway 61.” (That’s a somewhat obscure reference, by the way, to the great Canadian film Highway 61 – there is a scene where Satan tells a poor little girl with big dreams that she isn’t going to be famous, she’s going to be fat and work as a cashier.) But just when it appears that Luzajic might be feeling sorry for herself, (forgivable, I think, for in matters of love we all have those moments) suddenly, she is tough and beautiful and reflective: in Damage she tells us she can’t be sure “he is prepared for the life of a poet, for the rain soaked rooms her soul hides.” And in Untitled for A. she says confidently that she has been many things, from starlet to ghost to artist to lover and that she “was never all those pieces you could not pick off the ground.”

Eros is perhaps a loose interpretation because while many of the poems are erotic or about romantic partners, some of the most powerful are about family, and in fact Luzajic has dedicated the book to her husband, father and brother, the men who have, she says, made her who she is. The most stunning pieces in Love are those that open and close that section. In my brother shows me easter, she turns looking at the moon through her brother’s telescope into a visionary experience we can all share. And the piece that closes the first part of the book is a ten-part poem about family experience, bridging the themes nicely with a last line that refers to love and life as a complicated thing that can easily be simplified – in the end, it is only ashes after all.

It would be unfair to give too much away from the Death section of Luzajic’s poetry. For here, the artist’s soul is tortured by loss, and it is expressed so beautifully that the reader can’t help but cry. The poetry seems to contemplate the dead in all ways with unbelievable eloquence. There’s murder and mayhem and methamphetamine, suicide and AIDS and cancer. Yet something of that starry night shines in each poem, words that comfort and heal even as they mourn. The poems are very personal and yet one gets the feeling that they are written on behalf of everyone, for death is the only truly reliable fact of life.

Melissa Hennessy, writer, Toronto, Ontario

ORDERING INFORMATION: The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos by Lorette C. Luzajic through www.indigo.ca, www.amazon.com, or www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

There’s Something in the Meth

Ever hear a paranoid meth freak tell you that there’s something in the methamphetamine? I heard this time and time again. Dude, yes, there is. There’s meth in your meth.

Of course, there must be someone manipulating the stock for mind control purposes, for alien abductions, for attic laboratories. One roommate felt ‘violated’ by the recording devices hidden in stuffed animals. One user was sure that there was ‘something poisonous” in the meth he was using.

If you’ve watched a friend, roommate, parent, or child go mad from methamphetamine, you know there’s no hysteria in the meth hysteria today. It’s not reefer madness, it’s real. And help is hard to find once those neurons that let you hope and think and feel are destroyed. There’s a generation of human shells walking around. Dead men walking.

Sure, you can blame it all on people stupid enough to try the stuff, but cut some slack for those who made an impulsive choice. Have you tried alcohol? Good thing it’s not quite as lethal, at least not as quickly. I tried it twice, way back before Marko died, always up to try another good time. I didn’t have one, so I didn’t revisit it. I’m lucky.

Today another 25-year old girl was found dead, one of the few survivors from the old circle of friends ‘upstairs on Parliament Street.’ Five years of intensive psychiatric care, and a shrink stupid enough to prescribe Adderall for her addiction problem! Adderall, like Ritalin but worse, hardwires the mind to need speed. It’s nearly the same thing as methamphetamine, just not quite as strong or fast acting. The poor girl, once a vivacious, beautiful dreamer spent five years as a mere skeleton, checking the walls for bugs (both kinds), refusing to eat, scratching holes in her face. She died alone after one last hurrah. I’m speechless, but sadly, I’ve been in this place before. Marry, then bury. What can stop this? I’m not sure.

In all the recent press about poor little crazy girl Britney Spears, my heart has gone out for a pop icon I didn’t really care for before. With the immense pressures of fame, her impulsivity which I among many share, her disastrous marriage, and her serious postpartum depression, there’s only the money to assuage the emptiness. I always joked that I would like to ‘try’ and see if money could help my instabilities. All I am saying, is give cash a chance. Well, my dear Ms. Spears has illustrated its helplessness in restoring self-esteem or happiness. Her latest irrational incident holding her son hostage allegedly was a nightmare scenario of her losing her mind, muttering that K-Fed had planted the bugs in her home. DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR? Not one person, including her medical spokespeople, has ever pointed out the paranoia and madness that comes from the Adderall. COULD HAVE BEEN THE METH IN THE METH. While her alcohol and Ecstasy use have been greatly examined, has anyone thought that the treatment might be the cause?

I researched so many treatments, police and psychiatric programs, medical and naturopathic care, and drew a big blank. Even the seasoned psychiatric staff at Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and the judges in drug court, had no bleeding idea how to talk to, care for, or protect the meth addict. The drug-induced rage you hear about in zombie flicks is science fiction for the most part, but not when it comes to the meth in your meth. It’s terrifying for the few who are able to put the drug down and go on, they may or may not be better off. Many effects of the instantaneous brain damage are permanent. Which means you may always be convinced your wife is part of a CIA plot. Or you may always be unable to feel an emotion because you have no more dopamine wiring.

I likely wouldn’t be so reactionary if I weren’t still doing the body count. And it’s not about ‘my circle.’ Truck drivers, ministers, and dieting housewives are constantly making the news for their descent into meth. Apparently, it feels so good at first, and then after your first three-day bender, you’re already certifiably insane and you’re just waiting it out until the end. You might starve to death before you overdose.

In some ways it’s the Government Liars’ fault for being so hysterical about other drugs and not arming people with reasonable facts and choices. Everyone who grew up in the Just Say No generation can’t trust the information they were given. Obviously, marijuana didn’t cause murderous rampages, so the info about meth must also be outlandish. It makes you feel terrific and thin and able to complete two double shifts, a bonus if you need the money, as most blue collar North Americans do. In fact, job efficiency and productivity is the main reason the drug is becoming an epidemic in Thailand and other Asian countries. Life’s a bitch, then you work, then you die.

Please pray for E. and her family and friends. If you have any strategies or information or an inspirational story that might help, please share it. I feel incredibly hopeless today. The madness is not just far away in the hills of Hollywood, safe for a greedy gossip gorge. It’s close to home, mine and yours, too. Let’s pray for each other and share any answers or hope that we can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17808933/#storyContinued

http://todaystoronto.com/content/view/100/88/

My review of Toronto author’s book about meth.

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.