New England Needles

For fifty years, Thomas H. Borysek wrote poems and mailed them home.

A few at a time from 1967 to 2017, different poems to different people, sent from Chicago and later Wisconsin to the New England he never stopped returning to. Everyone who knew him held a handful of these cherished poems. Only Tom ever saw them all.

Tom captured the natural and spiritual world in precise, well-crafted poems that invite the reader to pause and reflect.

New England Needles gathers the whole set of poems for the first time and in the order he arranged them. A cricket under the hearth. A chickadee waiting out a crowd of sparrows for a single sunflower kernel. A new-fallen snow that pleases the young and delights the old. His father's voice while honing a knife blade.

Fifty years of paying attention, giving away one poem at a time.
Now, for the first time, here they all are at once.

In Seven Sections
Soliloquy of the Sea • A Blue Symphony with Clouds
A Robe of Winter Glaze • A Liquid Pomegranate Sphere
Planted Long Ago • Candles in Old Attic Windows
Fall Quickly to Catching Hands Below