Tender by Travis Cebula

In Cebula’s Tender, moments are captured like museum dioramas: an intricate balance between stillness & movement; approachable from multiple angles; and distilled down to their essential elements, shimmering like childhood. Cebula offers a tour of these dioramas that you won’t walk away from, in which the glass eyes look back at you, will hold your gaze. This collection brings together family history with the science of cleaning (Borax) and the quandary of how a text becomes a crystal and how crystal becomes a mother. You’ll learn that objects age just like humans and how their function has little to do with what sustains us. Objects are memories as well as potential. They somehow gather what is past and possible at the same time. And eventually, you’ll break your gaze, knowing that memories are mothers, too.

—Julia Cohen, author of I Was Not Born (Noemi Press)

Cebula’s text is a calico lens, reflecting glare, memory, obscured by facts and shadows, distilled into poetry. We zoom in and out of visual and emotional spaces, which reveal a fragmented story. An alternately transparent and translucent window into a singular family vocation, a mother, tenderly shared as yet unseen light.

—Alison Grace Koehler, author of Stained Glass Poetry (Paris Heretics)

In Tender Travis Cebula transforms raw, emotional experiences into preserved moments of artful reflection. Like crafting a glass eye through which we gaze and are gazed upon, without blinking, Cebula delves into the delicate balance between preserving the past and embracing the transient nature of life. These poems, "more like boiled tears than // a story," crystallize on the page in jagged but meticulous patterns the essence of fleeting moments—the permanence of love, the fragility of existence, the imprints left by those we cherish and must inevitably lose.

—Janaka Stucky, author of Ascend Ascend (Third Man Books)

Once upon a time, Travis Cebula was a classically trained chef and sommelier, and before that he studied philosophy, but now he lives in Colorado with his wife and trusty dogs, where he writes, edits, photographs, builds things, and teaches creative writing. His poems, short stories, essays, book reviews, and photographs have appeared internationally in various print and online journals.

He has authored six chapbooks and eight full-length collections of poetry, including Dangerous Things to Please a Girl, a sequence of Parisian poetry, The Sublimation of Frederick Eckert from Black Lawrence Press, and Refugee, a series of poems written over the course of six rather intense hours inside a retrospective exhibition of Marc Chagall’s work at the Musée du Luxembourg—and, thanks to the internet, available this very instant from BlazeVOX [Books].

He is also a graduate of Naropa’s MFA program in Writing and Poetics, AKA The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a distinguished writer in residence at the Left Bank Writers Retreat in Paris, France; a Pavel Srut Fellow, a finalist, an honorable mention, innumerable rejections, and generally tries to be a nice guy—which offers him a few excuses. On most days, you can find him somewhere between the margins. On some days, you can’t.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 116 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-462-8