Review by Mack Hassler “Henry Nash Smith, in Virgin Land: American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), analyzes the Buffalo Bill legend created in popular literature. Benjamin A.Botkin in A Treasury of American Folklore (1944) looks at the Wild West Show and its proprietor in the context of American Folk…
Review by Deborah K Frontiera Feet in the Waves: Poems of Lake Superior has as more topics, emotions, styles of writing, forms of poetry, and descriptions of the lake itself than could possibly fit in a review. In his foreword, editor Raymond Luczak states: “Her unknowingness is part of her…
Reviewer: Sharon Brunner Raymond Luczak’s book Ironhood: Poems recalls neighbors, neighborhoods, shopkeepers, his mother, past events, and places associated with the town of Ironwood, Michigan, a Gogebic Iron Range community. Ironwood is a town located in the western portion of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (U.P.). The town was founded…
Review by Sharon Brunner Raymond Luczak has captured the essence of the Deaf experience with all of its complications in his book The Language of Home: Stories, which took approximately 40 years to write. The time the stories took place varied from the 1970s to perhaps present time and it…
Reviewer: Sharon Brunner Raymond Luczak’s Animals Out-There W-i-l-d: A Bestiary in English and ASL Gloss painted a picture of the beauty of nature, nature’s resilience, and the ugliness of human behavior. Luczak wrote about the animals, reptiles, and birds who live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (U.P.) Luczak grew…
Review by Mack Hassler An early prose poem in this excellent collection of Yooper Poetry contains the Finn word vaaramaki, which means “danger hill.” The poem is by Kathleen M. Heideman who has some link to Finlandia University, formerly Suomi College, in Hancock. It may be now that even Finlandia…
Reviewer: Sharon Brunner Raymond Luczak, in this collection of essays called A Quiet Foghorn: more notes from a deaf gay life, renders an insightful and powerful message about his life as a Deaf gay man. At the age of 8 months, he began his journey as a hearing-challenged individual. As…
Reviewer: Sharon Brunner Raymond Luczak’s book “Compassion, Michigan: The Ironwood Stories” presented tales of courageous women who lived in Ironwood, Michigan, a small town located at the west end of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (U.P.). Many young men, during the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, fled to this community…
Review by Deborah K. Fronteira A poet as well-known as Raymond Luczak has been published in numerous books, anthologies, and literary journals. It would be hard to own all the various publications listed in the acknowledgment section of this volume, so Modern History Press made it easy working with Raymond…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera At first glance, one might find Luczak’s style of poetry more challenging to read than some because he uses no punctuation of any sort, not even an apostrophe. No capital letters either (though many poets skip capital letters). But then a reader may realize that…
Ironwood Native Son and Playwright Details His Struggles for Acceptance and Love Reviewed by Victor R. Volkman Raymond Luczak’s collection of autobiographical essays, Assembly Required: Notes From a Deaf Gay Life was accessible to me because it is very much the story of an outsider growing up in the 1980s. …
