PRAISE FOR ED RUZICKA

“Between hard times and heartfelt delight, Ed Ruzicka’s latest collection of poems The Invention of Dreaming finds a way to brim with hope. This book seduces the heart and mind with surrealistic revelations of a pandemic and the starkness passage of seasons where brotherhood and healing coexist with heartache and “the cleansing release of dreaming.” We pass through “nagging reflections, worse than a houseful of aunts” to find a world where the poet urges us to “Honor everything we hear, smell, see, taste or touch,” and to not let even a brother’s death diminish “the least of our acts.” Ruzicka uses a jazz pianist’s arpeggios, bird songs and the wind to create an anthem full of compassion and humanity.” – Mona Lisa Saloy, Louisiana Poet Laureate (2021- 2023) and author of Black Creole Chronicles

“Ed Ruzicka's The Invention of Dreaming witnesses’ extraordinary acts of compassion in poems that honor common experiences that poets often ignore. His vocation here, as in his day-job, is care. These are the poems that William Carlos Williams asked for: hands-on, tender but unflinching, written at the balance-point of celebration and elegy.” — Rodney Jones, winner of the Harper Lee Award in 2003 and the prestigious Kingsley-Tufts Award and author of Transparent Gestures and Salvation Blues

“In the Covid and post-Covid landscape of these poems, Ed Ruzicka shows us by poem-after-poem how the world goes on but can be transformed by our love and concern for one another. This densely textured book is healing. Read The Invention of Dreaming to go on surviving your life in our fractured times.” — Peter Cooley, Louisiana Poet Laureate 2015-2017, Professor Emeritus. Tulane University, author of Accounting for the Dark