As One Day Slips Out of the Shoe of Another

In As One Day Slips Out of the Shoe of Another, Pradzinski wields the pen as if it were an artist's brush. She paints intimate portraits of her parents and more distant relatives with carefully chosen words that convey both the scene and its emotional undercurrent. Many of these poems are still-life word pictures in which the visual images carry the weight of unspoken feelings. Her language is unfussy, made strong by its very spareness. She is a master of capturing the quiet tug between mother and growing daughter and between a father alternately stoic - with calloused hands and oil-stained work apron - and tender - devoted to the flowers he lovingly coaxes from the soil. Although these poems explore the erasure of time, Pradzinski does not leave us downhearted. She skillfully contrasts the fading past with the indelible legacy left by a loving family that gave her a vivid story and the strength and skill to tell it.

-Patrice Boyer Claeys, author of Honey from the Sun, The Machinery of Grace, and Lovely Daughter of the Shattering

As One Day Slips Out of the Shoe of Another has that slow lulling quality of remembering suggested by this early line - "beams of time . . . linger in my memory's cradle." Pradzinski writes in lovely lyrical moments the stories of influential generations - the grandmother in steerage sent to America as a child, the grandfather, a cabinet-maker, the mother, seamstress and bread maker, the father, a rose-pruner, and machinist. There's such fine detail in the witnessing - pouching oily apron pockets, "the ruby-bead / button of the [fish] belly, the purring of the Bernina sewing machine, the searing words of the nun, 'you're not a baby.'" The poems unspool the child-adult's saga of making her own way in the world from child to mother as she learns the lessons that disparate lives, and eventually loss, teach. In Pradzinski's book, "the present becomes the past" again and again. These poems surely speak to how we all move through the world in that memory place.

-Gail Goepfert, author of Self-Portrait with Thorns and Get Up Said the World

Landscape, filter, mirror, lens - in As One Day Slips Out of the Shoe of Another, memory takes all these forms and more. Each poem here is spare, but richly detailed; unflinchingly observed, but softened by time into something like "the shadow of smoke rising." Repeated images weave through the pages - a mother's "cinnamon-flecked / eyes", remembered street names, the scent of "lilacs/shivering the air" - to create a dream-past that readers will find warmly familiar. These poems don't merely glance back at the lush terrain of memory and experience; they lead us there by the hand and heart.

-Jan Bottiglieri, poet and author of Alloy and Everything Seems Significant