Overview

In The Cry of the Wounded Harpy, LitGarden Writers Press, 2025, George Grace's most recent poetry collection, he interrupts our complacence, pokes at us, scores our hearts, and holds up a mirror to the pain and beauty of the human experience. With wry wit, he excoriates us, yet comforts us with hope that we can save ourselves. In ""Damaged"", he admonishes, ""And so, we must bear this, every one of us, make it all work through that damage, find ways to repair ourselves."" Grace moves through the stages of love for the beauty of life, and his grief in leaving it. George Grace is the author of other collections, such as A Requiem for Sugar, The Eviction, A Divine Apprentice, The Assessment, Trophy, The Noise in My Head, American Stonehenge. Night Wanes, Dawn, Steeling America, Just Twelve More Poems - editor, A Hastening Countdown from Infinity

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Reviews

In George Grace's most recent poetry collection, he interrupts our complacence, pokes at us, scores our hearts, and holds up a mirror to the pain and beauty of the human experience. With wry wit, he excoriates us, yet comforts us with hope that we can save ourselves. In ""Damaged"", he admonishes, ""And so, we must bear this, every one of us, make it all work through that damage, find ways to repair ourselves."" -Kate Willoughby, poet, editor, Tilting Toward the Moon, and Just Twelve More Poems Witty, poignant, and constantly questioning, George Grace offers up something that could be a swan song, if that swan was a corvus, and wore a 7 a.m. shadow with more grit than a band of highway men. He presents questions that don't have clean answers, teaches lessons in their absence. The undertone of love for his wife is palpable. In ""TripTik to My Next Life"", he writes: ""...all the wrinkles, failures, and procrastinations of my born-imperfect life"". There is power in these pages. -GS Murphy, poet, author of Surviving the Day and When Blood Isn't Enough. Demolitions expert, grim, gruff George Grace swings his sledgehammer gleefully against paper- wall pieties, yet seeks common cause with his reader in this latest collection of poems, The Cry of the Wounded Harpy. Through the ""cracks and fissures"" of his damaged self, the poet is beguiled by ordinary wonder (movements of clouds and trees), by simple courtesy (from a waitress, from a driver), and by unexpected beauty (""that brilliant neon graffiti / sprayed on those passing boxcars""). Alone with his thoughts at a stoplight, the poet-artist fancies himself a ""late night fog-tourist."" Grace wins our trust that he will help us find our way. -Bartlett White, author of Your Session Is About to Time Out In The Cry of the Wounded Harpy, George Grace writes with heart-strengthening honesty and heartbreaking humor about aging in a toxic and wounded world. Grace the master painter shows us how to harness stark beauty on late night wanderings in the ""halos of auto headlamps"", observes that we are all ""Damaged, with no return policy / and no refund"". He drips these evanescent moments into paintings where ""In the darkened storefront windows, / pinpoint reflections of streetlamps / glow like the vacant / stares of the dead"". And so, we trudge along with our own fragile bodies to drink the ""glass of cool water / laced with microplastics"" and come face-to-face with the ""snow moon, supersized and citrus orange / casting the tree limb-laced shadows"". These moving poems patch our own ""leaking cracks and fissures"". -Sara Ries Dziekonski, author of Today's Specials and Marrying Maracuyá

Author Information

George Grace has worn many hats in his lifetime: playwright, poet, fiction and nonfiction writer, visual artist, tournament chess player, tournament volleyball player and coach, steelworker, home remodeling contractor, teacher, editor, publisher, columnist, musician, actor, social activist, and campaign manager--each in his quest to be creative and find his niche in Buffalo, New York, where he spent all but two years of his life. He enjoyed modest successes in most of these pursuits, but age and fortuitous circumstances brought him to concentrate on his two great loves, writing and art. Six of his plays were staged in Western New York from the late 70s through the mid-80s, most notably The Eviction and A Divine Apprentice, the latter selected for the first Area Playwrights Series at the Buffalo Entertainment Theatre. George taught writing at SUC at Buffalo, Attica State Correctional, and at Villa Maria College, for the Circleformance Streetwriters' workshop, and for Writers-in-Education in the Buffalo Public Schools. In 1984 he also founded and ran Circleformance, a successful showcase for writers and musicians in Buffalo, and worked as a columnist and investigative reporter for Buffalo Alternative Press.

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