City of Regret

by Andrew Kozma

Poetry. "In Andrew Kozma's poems, the world is intriguingly askew: The desert sky opens like the mouth of a dying fish.' Cafes undress, walls merge with air, and rooms speak, sometimes even returning one's gaze, projecting strange images that will shadow you like portraits whose eyes follow you around the room and even into the street. Kozma is at his best evoking those odd moments of disorientation when the stuff of your life transforms, seeming to submerge into a matrix of dream--those moments air becomes solid and you stare through ice / like a man in a glacier....'"--J. Allyn Rosser.

74 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

Andrew Kozma's fiction has been published in Albedo One, Interzone, Fantasy Scroll and Daily Science Fiction. His poems have appeared in Blackbird, Subtropics, Copper Nickel, and Best American Poetry 2015. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphantrophia was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press. He has been the recipient of a Jentel Residency, a Houston Arts Alliance Fellowship, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship, and a D. H. Lawrence Fellowship. He lives and writes in Houston, Texas.

Reviews

[Penayei Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The moment I see the Title, the comment I eager to read it...

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased City of Regret after reading a review. I am drawn to poetry of loss, and I was eager to see how Kozma’s poetry addressed his father’s death. I wanted to love this book, I really did, but I struggled with the poems from the beginning. I actually put the book down for several days, thinking maybe it was just me, that I was unable to lose myself in the writing, but when I picked it up again I found the poems just as obscure. I’m not sure I would have understood that the main theme of this collection is Kozma’s father’s death if I hadn’t read the review. I don’t mind working, I enjoy poetry that makes me stop and think, but I want to think about the issues raised, the beauty of the language; I don’t enjoy battling for basic comprehension.

The book is arranged in sections with headings suggestive of architecture. Kozma’s titles are terrific, and without them I would have been even more lost. His voice is dark,sullen, almost angry. He uses many interesting images and lines.
they won’t remember
when surgeons unhook the heart

and hold the body open
as it rushes to fill itself.
(The Transplant Ward)

the sidewalk bejeweled with silver gum wrappers,
(Disappearances)

Kozma gives us fresh similes.
The plane slips through clouds like a needle through skin.
(On The Way To My Father’s Death)

After reading the entire collection twice, I returned to the introductory poem, and found that it made much more sense. It sets up and almost explains the book. The poem is titled Dis, which is a fictional city from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Are we to infer that the speaker is in hell, or the deceased father? Perhaps the speaker journeys through hell in an attempt to reconnect with his father. This is suggested by the closing lines of the poem:
When a ravine splits the sky, Earth’s muddy light
unearths my father. We have much to talk about.

I appreciate Kozma’s word choices and imagery enough that I am not so frustrated as to give up on reading newer work.

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

City of Regret by Andrew Kozma is broken into five parts and each section is named for some element of the city — entrances, walls, living spaces, alleys, and exits. As a prologue to the collection, Kozma begins with the poem “Dis” (page 1), which is a fictional city in Dante’s The Divine Comedy containing the lower circles of hell. Like Dante, Kozma goes on a journey through hell, but the poet is traveling through these circles to find his father who has died and with whom he has unfinished business as he says in the final lines: “When a ravine splits the sky, Earth’s muddy light/unearths my father. We have much to talk about.//” This poem sets the tone for the remainder of the collection with its melancholy and mournful tone.

In the first section — Entrances — Kozma uses individual poems to explore the various ways people and other beings meet, greet, avoid, and rush toward death. In “That We May Find Ourselves at Death” (page 8), he echoes the lines of Emily Dickinson, who could not stop for death, when he asks where you go when you are late for death? He questions how death is confronted when it has already happened and there is no way to turn back the clock. But in other poems — such as “Night Meeting” (page 6) — the poet evokes violent images of a dead squirrel’s body pulsating with ants to demonstrate not only the sudden impact and violence of death, but the messy aftermath that often follows. However, death need not always be violent and unexpected, it can come silently . . . gradually like in ” Your Sketch of the Church in Mourning” (page 13): ” . . . You step with silence,/walking out, and walk slowly. Navigate the marble floor/softly, or you will not hear the dead/call after you.//”

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2011/04/c...

[J.I. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The kind of poetry that seems exciting on the line level, but which makes you ruminate on the lines, on the whole, on the structure of the book, in order to fully understand how much deeper it goes beyond great linework and beautiful similes.

[Nicole]

My dear friend andrew--the poet.