Perry Nicholas, The River of You

Eric County Community College English Professor Perry Nicholas has just published his first book-length collection of poems, The River of You, with Rochester area poetry press Foothills Publishing.  The public is invited to hear him read from this collection and other work at Talking Leaves Main Street store on Thursday, December 10, at 7 pm. Admission is free; copies of the book will be available for purchase and autographing.

In an author’s statement for this book, Perry Nicholas says The River of You is a combination of poems inspired by other writers or artists, family, real and imagined relationships that hopefully transcend ego and translate to the universal.  A poet must be constantly moved by others, influenced by reading and history.  He extracts a spark from anywhere, wraps himself around an idea, and comes up with his truest sentence (to paraphrase Hemingway). My writing process begins with a reverence to what has come before. I sift through it for a tiny truth, wrap my own voice around it, and follow up with painstaking revisions to tell the story as clearly and vividly as possible. This is my passion, my humble responsibility to the reader and the artists who have molded me. This book is my tribute to what has influenced my life-literature, languages, family, and friends. In turn, I hope it touches the reader in his or her personal journey.

David Landrey, retired Buffalo State College English Professor, says this:

Ah, that grand elusive “you”: lover, alter-ego, ancestor, fellow writer; a mirror wherein to see ourselves amid our world. Perry Nicholas casts the “other” in a light at once dark and mellow as he searches his history and ours for faint clues to our nature. His River of You winds through Greece and Western New York, gathers many voyagers, and flows into a deep inland sea.  We float along and hope that we may say with him, “I find myself, writing again.

Perry S. Nicholas is an English professor at Erie Community College North in Williamsville, N.Y., where he was awarded the 2008 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities. Nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize, in 2006, 2007, and 2008, his poems appear in Common Ground Review, Fourth River, Caesura, Word Worth, Not Just Air, Hudson View, Language and Culture, Nickel City Nights, Seven Circle Press, Feile-Festa, Louisiana Literature and will appear in the 2010 Chautauqua Literary Journal and The New York Quarterly.  He is the host of the Center for Inquiry/Just Buffalo Literary Café and co-host of the Appletree Readings sponsored by Empire State College and Erie Community Colleges.