Moon Over the Cross Bronx Expressway

The 52 poems in N.G. Haiduck's first book of poetry, Moon Over the Cross Bronx Expressway, are about people, lovers, young and not so young, joy and hardship, in a contemporary urban setting, under "The same bright moon that surveys fields, oceans, lovers' lanes in Indiana . . . " Congested, clamorous, sometimes perilous, the Cross Bronx Expressway cuts across the Bronx like a scar. It is the main artery leading in-and out-of the Bronx, dividing but also connecting neighborhoods and people to each other, to the rest of the city, to the rest of the nation-and beyond. "I have met people from the Bronx in an elevator in Paris, in a ramen restaurant in Tokyo, in a jazz club in Lima, and in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, says Haiduck. "These poems are about people; that's why they're important." The title poem won the Janice Farrell Poetry Prize from the National League of American Pen Women. Selections won the BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts. The first draft, Haiduck's City College of New York M.F.A. thesis, won the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing, judged by Marilyn Hacker.