Customer Reviews

North of the Port: Stories

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Many will think of this short story collection as regional fiction. In so-doing they will miss the intense constructions of its author. Bukoski, a product of the Iowa Writers Workshop, is not a regional writer. He is a man of much understanding of the delicate relationships between people to are new to one another, and the complications that go with these. You will meet some people that you could not have imagined existing, find their dreams told, and their frustrations found. Many would think of these as "small people". Too know how intense these folks are, is to find this: we need be better focused on those we live with. One could read this as a religious piece, as I choose to do. Others, can see it as an intensely-focused vision on how separately-developed come to know -- for a short period -- who they are, and might be. It would be good to conjoin my view with those of the others. JAS

Anthony Bukoski's excellent short story collections are among the very finest examples of Polish American literature. In North of the Port the author once again takes the reader to the fading Polish neighborhood of Superior, Wisconsin where there's rust on the Dom Polski sign and fewer and fewer attend the masses at St. Adalbert's. These are stories about sad, lonely, working people who desperately cling to the headier days of yesteryear when the jukebox belted out polkas down at the crowded neighborhood tavern after the day shift.

Bukoski's other Polish-American short story collections are Children of Strangers, Polonaise, and Time Between Trains.

Recently Northern Lights Books and Gifts of Duluth, MN threw a launch party for Anthony Bukoski's North of the Port, his fifth collection of short stories. With these books, lovingly depicting the joys and heartaches of the Polish community in Superior, Wisconsin, Tony has achieved a well-deserved national following. While his writing is rooted firmly in regional culture, his themes of love, loss, and endurance, evoked by way of the everyday, are universal.

At the launch party, he read a story called "The Wally Na Zdrowie Show." It is crafted as a personal letter in which the narrator, while trying to emphasize the good news, evokes the sadness of economic hardship in our region. Among other things, he contemplates selling the accordion handed down from his father. Without lapsing into sentimentality, Tony's sure touch uncovers the many losses and disappointments that cling like dust to instrument's yellowed keys. Another story, told by a regular at the Dirty Shame Saloon, ostensibly talks about the girls who visit the town's bars selling roses. As he speak, the narrator's own disappointed love emerges in prose as evocative as any poem.

Anthony Bukoski is the heir of Sherwood Anderson, whose Winesburg, Ohio more or less established the American standard for the story collection chronicling the life of a single town. Like many heirs, Tony surpasses his predecessor. North of the Port is published by Southern Methodist University Press.

Like many other Americans I've always been curious about the journey my grandparents made from Poland to the USA, or Ameryka as they called the USA. Bukoski's "North of the Port" follows several DP's, displaced persons, as they struggle to make their way in the USA. Not only did I learn about their struggles to find acceptance I throughly enjoyed the book as well.