Travelers | signed

In these impressionistic, roaming poems, David Michael Belczyk journeys into memories and across cities and continents—Bayeux’s “soaring spires,” Rochester’s “shuttered clapboard houses,” Granada’s “aisles of palm through iron bars,” Puerto Rico’s “wind and rivulets [that] ran through the open doors”—as he searches for “a sacred place . . . hallowed by the ones that went before.”  These are poignant songs of longing and desire that evoke the complexities of attraction to the real and imagined, the actual and the mythic, the love that compels the poet to meander for meaning “toward the end of all roads.” — Orlando Ricardo Menes, The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds

Travelers is Belczyk’s serenade to places and to place; multiple journeys of body and of mind. These poems constitute a nuanced seeking after desire, and the sometimes perplexing results of that search. —Gerald Costanzo, Regular Haunts: New and Previous Poems

The poetry of geography says that every place awaits the traveler. It’s what the poet imagines each place to be as well as what it becomes when he goes there. Local or distant, it becomes personal in the poet’s imagination. Take a trip with David Michael Belczyk in these instant poems, and you’ve seen the world. — Samuel Hazo, The Less Said, the Truer

David Michael Belczyk’s Travelers is an ambitious, conceptual collection that covers a lot of territory, both geographical and emotional. This series of love poems to places examines the important connections we make to specific locations, environments, and the influence those things have on our lives. A fascinating exploration. — Jim Daniels, Gun/Shy and The Luck of the Fall