Author of Submerged and Useful Shrapnel
NEW!
The Only Map You'll Need
coming this November!
John Findura is the author of the poetry collection Submerged (Five Oaks Press, 2017), the forthcoming The Only Map You'll Need (2026), and the chapbook Useful Shrapnel (2022). He holds an MFA from The New School, an M.Ed in Professional Counseling, and an Ed.D in Educational Technology. His poetry and criticism appear in numerous journals including Verse; Fourteen Hills; Copper Nickel; Pleiades; Forklift, Ohio; Sixth Finch; Prelude; and Rain Taxi. A guest blogger for The Best American Poetry, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife and daughters.
Now available for pre-order!
These wonderful poems tunnel through everyday life doggedly yet with a crooked grin. Along the way, reality unravels, weaves itself together, falls apart again. Witty and oddly moving, this book invites you to linger in its dream logic. Here melancholy flirts with absurdity, and the result is an opera, not one with dukes and varlets and castles in Italy, but a tale of ordinary life. You get the feeling that our keen-eyed author is telling his own story, reader, and then you realize he’s telling yours. - David Kirby, author of The Winter Dance Party, Poems 1983-2023
In The Only Map You’ll Need, John Findura charts a modern Darwinian road trip through the landscape of the self, exploring the complex disorderliness of the mind one pain at a time. These poems, humorous and strange, deceptively plainspoken and full of longing, translate the poet’s relentless compulsions into language capable of turning the world’s chaos into moments of clarity and resonance: “And I tell you, truthfully, because there is no / other way of telling you anything, that, yes, / everything hurts, even if you can’t see it.” Findura has given us a radiant atlas—we should study it closely. - Joshua Poteat, author of The Regret Histories
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USEFUL SHRAPNEL
“John Findura’s Useful Shrapnel is an amazing tour de force of language and sentiment. Moreover, his poetry demonstrates what it is to be a real human being.”
–Noelle Kocot
“John Findura’s strange and alluring Useful Shrapnel delights us and teaches us to listen ever more closely, ever more actively, to our various hopes and fears and performances. He writes: “I collect the broken / things and I reform / them into what I think / they should look like / which is often words / that amuse only me”–and in this dance there is a challenge and a process that can teach us what is necessary. “Draw a map of the rooms,” he writes, “So we’ll know where to hide”–self and other, self and self-in process, transformation–Findura teaches us what it is to feel and think. Useful Shrapnel is wonderful poetry.”
–Joseph Lease
SUBMERGED
In Findura's post-diluvian lyrical apocalypse, the covenant of the rainbow is reneged, replaced by an anxiety of everyday pathologies we all feel and recognize, whether living near a coastal border or further inland. These pages absorbed me like one of Prospero's drowned books till my eyes turned to pearls, fixed on Medusa's raft.
- Timothy Liu
John Findura's Submerged is a series of short, clear meditations on the beauty, the power, and the terror of water. It's a striking collection, reader-friendly, but unflinching in its treatment of personal fear and wonder.
- Billy Collins
"I have made sure that I am not anxious," John Findura claims early in Submerged, but of course it's never that easy. Anxiety sweeps and crashes over this collection like the waters of its unnamed nemesis, Hurricane Sandy. Through these plainspoken yet harrowing poems, Findura learns--and teaches his readers--something that is as true of devastation as it is of survival: "This happens all the time / and we barely realize it."
- Mark Bibbins