A Hard Fall and Good Bounce

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For me, poetry has always been an act of assembling fragments—scraps of the everyday, fleeting moods, stubborn questions that refuse silence. A single detail often sparks a poem: the glint of an apple’s skin, the hiss of rain on pavement, the momentary blur of a passing taxi. From there it expands, unfolding into a landscape where recollection and invention overlap.

“Stuckness” explores inertia as both personal weight and cultural condition. Through fractured imagery—California’s lost groves, crooked moons, stocky guards, and porcelain shards—the poem examines how confinement shapes identity. It suggests that stagnation is not merely paralysis, but an American inheritance, a paradoxical force that both imprisons and defines us.

In Darkening Skies and Black Coffee, those fragments gather into a shifting terrain of voices and images—suitcases and nightclubs, marriages and departures, the heavy undertone of gloom. The poems move restlessly between diary and dreamscape, at once physical and intangible, intimate and strange.

At the core of the collection lies this oscillation: between the familiar and the unsettling, between the rooted and the surreal. Rather than explain life, these poems dwell within its contradictions—its fractures, its small rituals of repair, its uneasy consolations in memory and in words.

My hope is that readers will glimpse themselves in these pages, as if in a mirror of fragments: a recognition that even under darkening skies, one can taste the sharp clarity that lingers, like a cup of black coffee at dawn.

—Brian D’Ambrosio

https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Fall-Good-Bounce