Dark Guitar

R. Nikolas Macioci’s Dark Guitar is suffused with songs of experience. This is a poet who has been there and seen what you might have missed. The beauty of a face. An angelic collarbone. A brief passage of a song. A memory tendril. Times too when nothing seemed to have an easy explanation. Each brilliant strum comes from Macioci not as a professorial lecture, but rather from a friend you’ve known for years. This is poetry akin to Ted Kooser and Donald Hall in style, with the passions of Mark Doty and Frank O'Hara. These are poems of momentary occurences and remembrances of bodies, of love, and desire at full stretch.

• Wm. Anthony Connolly, author of Psalms & Stones and The Smallest Universe

Macioci’s poems in Dark Guitar are immediately evocative of neon light drenched in cigarette smoke, the clack of balls on a pool table, and the dim tunes of a wasted jukebox. Channeling a rougher Bukowski, these poems speak to the need for connection with others, and yet, always remaining adrift. The writing in this collection reminds us of what it means to be of an age where even a stranger’s words matter… and in places where jazz riffs ease into the night like a practiced prostitute. If poetry can dance in the atmosphere of a noir thriller, this is it.

• Blake Edward Hamilton, author of Move In Silence