Maura Way
Maura Way is the author of Another Bungalow (Press 53). Her poetry and flash memoir has been widely published in journals such as The Appalachian Review, Poet Lore, Hong Kong Review, Puerto del Sol, Hotel Amerika, and The Potomac Review. Her work has also been featured in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Poetry in Plain Sight program. Originally from Washington, DC, Maura lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, by way of Boise, Idaho. She has been an English teacher since 1995, most recently at New Garden Friends School.
by Maura Way
Coming November 5, launch reading at Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC, 2-3 p.m.
ISBN 978-1-950413-70-6
9 x 6 softcover, 74 pages
Maura Way’s new book is stuffed with poems that make one think, make one chuckle, and make one re-read. We're lucky when a poet’s sense of humor merges with old-soul wisdom, and who’s to say it’s “all for naughtiness”? This poet, who, she avows, has “seen clowns from / both sides now.” This is fresh, prescient work, and I'm grateful for it. —Janet Holmes, author of The ms of m y kin
The living texture of late America: Another Bungalow reconstitutes it, spiky as it ever was. Way’s poems are short and quick, brilliantly witty, and unwind from themselves sinuously and ruthlessly. We need this kind of fun! Dauntless, cruel, all-heart, trustworthy fun. —Catherine Wagner, author of Nervous Device
Sample Poem
After Dinner at Luigi’s
I sideswiped a very big Benz
right on Dupont Circle proper.
I was driving my Dodge Neon
and was on a half-blind date
with a law student. He told
me not to say anything. Very
friendly men smoking small
cigarettes poured out of the
Mercedes, took a quick look,
and said it was nothing. No
damage, see? Such a sturdy
sand-colored luxury sedan
immune to green economy
cars with questionable lane
integrity. My date and I had
met at a Halloween party: he
wasn't in costume, and I was
dressed up as a hockey puck.
When he spilled his Zima at
dinner, I was relieved that the
jinx part of the date was over.
Then I got in the fender bender
on our way to Bedrock Billiards.
I've always assumed the men
in the Benz were Saudis; the
flowy one-piece button-ups,
the white keffiyeh affixed with
twisted black cords. Now I know
this was a hasty generalization.
The law student never called
me again. I beat him at pool,
and surely he imagined unmet
miracles under that hockey puck.
~ ~ ~
“After Dinner at Luigi’s” from Another Bungalow by Maura Way, copyright © 2017 by Maura Way
Praise for Another Bungalow
The living texture of late America: Another Bungalow reconstitutes it, spiky as it ever was. Way’s poems are short and quick, brilliantly witty, and unwind from themselves sinuously and ruthlessly. We need this kind of fun! Dauntless, cruel, all-heart, trustworthy fun.
—Catherine Wagner, author of Nervous Device
The poems of Another Bungalow are endearing antidotes to memory’s rose-colored glasses; they chronicle the informal, indelible microeducations meted out through circumstance, strangers, and a quirky sense of humor. (Will having dressed as a hockey puck for Halloween determine your relationship with the man you met that evening?) If you never lost your bite-plate to the sea in a teenage laughing jag or conceded to a bully’s demands because they were addressed to the name on your second-hand gym shirt, you’ll still relate. Maura Way’s poems celebrate the “satiation found out beyond the bronze,” the “small but generative victories” that keep us, in our normal lives, unique.
—Janet Holmes, author of The ms of m y kin
With a deft hand and succinct syntax, Maura Way presents us with an exploration of memory that gives weight and meaning to the seemingly insignificant moments of life—teaching us to understand that what flits past us, may stay with us forever.
—Charlie Lovett, New York Times bestselling author of The Bookman's Tale and The Lost Book of the Grail