John Popielaski

That Special Something
by John Popielaski

ISBN: 978-1-962405-21-8 $17.00
(+$4.63 US SHIPPING per order)

Also available as an Ebook from online retailers:
ISBN 9781962405225

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Popielaski is the author of the novel, The Hollow Middle (Unsolicited Press), as well as several poetry collections, including Isn’t It Romantic? (Texas Review Press). His poetry has appeared in a number of journals, including most recently Bicoastal Review, Canary, Common Ground Review, and Public School Poetry. His second novel, Attuning, is forthcoming from Broken Tribe Press in late 2025, and he has recently been promoted to the status of a person by whom a house wren at long last has consented to be hand fed.

ABOUT THE BOOK

That Special Something is about ideals and compromises, aspirations, good-faith efforts, and the specter of futility. There’s ample grief, but, with apologies to Robert Frost, there’s also ample grievance, for it is in grievance that the gods allow more latitude for humor. What sort of humor? If you took a Vanitas/Memento Mori painter, converted such into a poet, made it so that the perspective shifted to include more flora and more animals, more waterways and beer, more cracked corn and more longing for the father, more references to weaponry and xenia, more fretting since, collectively, we’re so much closer to the end, you’d have the sort of gallows humor that prevails here. Yet there’s poignancy. There’s beauty. There is joy. It’s like the death’s head on the cover, a reminder of the obvious, of the impending simplification. In the meantime, we are free to take a smoke, to be surrounded by as many flowers as we can, to grin as though we really don’t have anything to lose.

ADVANCE PRAISE

Throughout these finely honed lyrical poems, John Popielaski finds a unified purpose in the seeming disparity of all manner of existence, whether mountain lions, horseweed, bee balm, garden slugs, unmown grass, or misnomered humanity. If Robinson Jeffers walked among us today—& who’s to say he doesn’t—he’d write poetry like this.

–Matt Morris, editor of Home Planet News, author of Reckoning Ball

That Special Something is a manual for self-reliance in the face of nature’s challenge. In both thought and deed John Popielaski hoes his own auteur rows and immerses the reader in his beautiful refusal of convenience and apex predator ambition. Ambling through his lines is like riding in the breast pocket of Thoreau on his way to Home Depot. He builds. He amends. He transforms his environment but always with an eye towards “something elemental in our lives [that] distances necessity”. He takes care to intricately entwine himself with the creatures of his days while transcending American myth and bearing a St. Francis-like compassion that manifests in xenia. He is an “American toad residing . . . beneath the moss”.

–Tim Kahl, editor at Clade Song