by Raymond Luczak (Author)
In Far from Atlantis, Raymond Luczak makes use of traditional poetic forms to tell the stories of two vastly different worlds: the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which often looks like an island on the map, and the fabled island of Atlantis. The poems in this collection are rooted in the natural world, with the power of water as a means for escaping the cruelty and tedium of an ableist society. While recounting his troubled childhood as the only deaf person in a large hearing family, Luczak aligns himself with mythological, monstrous, and superhuman beings who, like him, exist on the margins. The narratives invoked and the worlds created in these poems are both autoethnographic and speculative, and include figures lost to history like Lucy Frances Fitzhigh Hooe and Frances Peterson, along with 1970s pop culture icons like the Six Million Dollar Man and Wonder Woman.
Author Biography
Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of over thirty books, including the poetry collections Chlorophyll, Lunafly, and once upon a twin, which was selected as a Top Ten U.P. Notable Book of the Year for 2021. His prose titles include A Quiet Foghorn: More Notes from a Deaf Gay Life, From Heart into Art: Interviews with Deaf and Hard of Hearing Artists and Their Allies, and the award-winning Deaf gay novel Men with Their Hands. Luczak's work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. An inaugural Zoeglossia Poetry Fellow, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.