"Macioci's poems lead us on a contemplative walk through the seasons. Closely attuned to nature, they linger on the details of tulip and milkweed, paint vivid images from childhood memories, meditate on impermanence and mortality, aware that "there is no successful way/to study death at a distance." Weeding the garden evokes thoughts of burial. The autumn trees "scribble a signature of loss/teach me how death can be/the origin of perfect beauty". Unsentimental, with the quiet beauty of acceptance, the poems accompany the reader "on the mortal road/of a temporary season."
-Agnes Vojta, author of A Coracle for Dreams
"What strikes me the most about
Stoney Seasons is the organization, how it centers around each season of the year: winter, spring, summer, and autumn, which sounds simple, but is never something I would have thought to do. It is gripping in the way the seasons themselves are as you walk through them, stare out the window at them. And that doesn't really do the book justice in the way the reading does. I wanted to go back and read the entire book again, or just the season I'm in, because I did not think I got everything there was to get even though I read each poem more than once. This is a rare reaction to a book for me, but I think it is something you keep close and open frequently for what it offers."
-Kyle Laws, The Sea Is Woman, 2020 Moonstone
Press award, Uncorseted, Kung Fu Teachery
Press, and Wildwood, Lummox Press
R. Nikolas Macioci earned a PhD from The Ohio StateUniversity, and for thirty years taught for the Columbus City Schools. In addition to English, he taught Drama and developed a Writers Seminar for select students. OCTELA, the Ohio Council of Teachers of English, named Nik Macioci the best secondary English teacherin the state of Ohio. Nik is the author of fifteen books. Critics and judges called
Cafes of Childhood a "beautifully harrowing account of child abuse," but not "sentimental" or "self-pitying," an "amazing book," and "a single unified whole."
Cafes of Childhood was submitted for the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. In 2021, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net award. In 2022, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. More than two hundred of his poems have been published here and abroad in magazines and journals, including
Chiron, Concho River Review, The Bombay Review, Humana Obscura, and West Trade Review. He won First Place in the 1987 National Writer's Union Poetry Competition, judged by Denise Levertov, First Place in The Baudelaire Award Competition, sponsored by The World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets (1989), Second Place in
Zone 3's first annual Rain-maker Awards, judged by Howard Nemerov (1989), and Second Place in the Writer's Digest annual competition, judged by Diane Wakoski (1991).
