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ENDORSEMENT FOR LINDA WLODYKA'S BOOK MISTRESS OF THE WICK She imagines time as mannequins in the windows of a defunct clothing store staring vacantly; she ""ignores time"" while watching ""sunrise, sundown, night, stars, fireflies."" She hears the moon croon its spells over the brain-bone. This is the mistress of the wick speaking the open secrets of word magic culled from dictionary, yes, but more occultly the thesaurus from which the incantation of synonyms is brewed, the dance of syllables is tapped upon the stretched leather of what's left of the heart after so many blows, so many wars, so many genocides of innocence, so many years struggling to find a balance between self and world as seen through the eyes of a woman once a tomboy hanging upside down by her scraped knees from a tree branch who has become one with her veil to such an extent that it's difficult to disengage from voyages into picture postcards enough to write something on them; and then there are the reveries, the storms, the snows, the rains, the winds of feelings expressible in no other way except the music of the blind organs of the body where the dirges of abandonment and betrayal are buried and where the courage and determination to go on despite every word to the contrary are born. These poems and the flash fictions that are like them have a feel about them like the so-called ""primitive"" paintings of Grandma Moses; sometimes they're built on made-up words like ""flinked"" that leap across the page like ekphrastic Mikhail Baryshnikovs in an ecru tutu. You want poetry that is life itself, beauty, wisdom, vision, music, language rinsed of its cliches? Look no further. This is it. Bill Tremblay, Poet Laureate of Southbridge MA ***************************************************************************************************************************************** Linda Bratcher Wlodyka retired as an educator from Mt. Greylock Regional School District in Williamstown in 2020. She served as the Massachusetts Beat Poet Laureate (2023-2025). Linda was commissioned in 2025 to write an ekphrastic poem to a sculpture titled, In Sync, sculpted by Kathy Ruttenberg from Hudson Valley, NY. The statue was on loan to the The Mount in Lenox, MA, the summer home of writer, Edith Wharton. Linda's poem, ""Secret Cottage"" was voted Best in the Berkshires (2012). Linda self-published 3 chapbooks, Her Spirited Cameo, Voices from the Blue Room and Tick Tock. Her first full length poetry collection released September 2023 is titled, If Brambles Were Bookends Collected Poems(c) 2023, published by Human Error Publishing. Linda represented The National Beat Poetry Foundation at the 2024 Lowell Celebrates Kerouac. She featured her original poems written in the vein of Jack Kerouac and participated in an all-women panel discussing the past and current beat poetry movements. She has been featured as poet of the week and poet of the month in Beatlife, an online magazine, and her poetry as been widely anthologized. She is a member of The Florence Poet's Society and is on their editing board for their yearly anthology, Silkworm. Her latest release Mistress of the Wick is a new collection of poetry and flash fiction from Metaphysical Fox Press in 2026

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