The Hand on the Head of Lazarus

Editorial Reviews:

Christina Zawadiwskys poems are marvelous. Spectacularly imaginative, alive with eeriness, surprising at every turn, they are like no one elses. -- Mark Strand

I feel drawn to her work. It has the overtones of European poetry as it is being written today in the Ukraine, Poland, in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere that was once under Soviet domination. It has anger and humor inextricably joined. -- David Ignatow

Poem after poem is powerful, fresh, audacious, sexy and convincing. Its amazing work, exciting. The vision has such authenticity and the images such cumulative power that Imcompletely won over. --Phillip Lopate

The Hand On The Head Of Lazarus - a beautiful book! -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I admire the way she takes risks in her poetry. -- Philip Levine

This is beautiful poetry, poetry that has had, in Wordsworths words, unconscious intercourse with beauty. Zawadiwskys sense of the beautiful is informed with an aching, haunting, persistent otherness, enigmatic and sub- if not un-conscious, that seems to walk with her every day of her life. --Ivan Arguelles, Poetry Flash

A strong collection using an unusual, surreal voice, rich with descriptions.-- The Bookwatch

Observers who moan that American poetry has turned wan and bloodless in the last decade will find surcease in their complaints..Zawadiwskys poems bound across the page, bleeding on the thorns of rebirth and lost love with a Shelleyan energy rarely seen in our poetically anemic times. -- Choice

Love and deceit, spiritual death and resurrection, pain and healing: these are the subjects of her poems, written in a language of real involvement, real suffering and questioning. She has not separated herself from the world, she has wedded herself to it, all the way down to blood and psyche, to dreams, to the original water. She is the legitimate representation of a tradition that begins with Whitmans cry and what you feel, I will feel. -- Small Press Review

The poetry of Christina Zawadiwsky does not flinch. Though many of her poems reveal intense suffering, the reader is not left with a sense of futility or quiet desperation. While others write poetry so as to exorcise pain that has been deeply internalized, Zawadiwskys _expressions are of re-creations of pain that bring transformation into final victory.
-- Galley Sail Review

-----From the book jacket section:

There is a sensual surrreality and lush abandon to Christina Zawadiwsky's poems. These poems are kaleidoscopic prayers and a life's fecund fables, full of humor and horro; they are rich, as all fables should be, with the heart's white magic and desire. -- David St. John

My blurb, for the back of the book, is: The poems in The Hand On The Head Of Lazarus stand not in one world but in many worlds, where transformation in every direction is possible: a flower is the tip of a knife, death is the beginning of love. And all feelings will and must be examined in the penetrating and mysterious light that burns at the edge of each of our lives.

My bio (which appeared on the jacket cover) is: Christina Zawadiwsky is Ukrainian, was born in New York City, has a degree in Fine Arts, has received a National Endowment grant and two Wisconsin Arts Boards awards. She currently lives in Milwaukee, where she is working on a book of poems, a book of short stories, and a novel. This is her first major book of poetry.