In The Dark Curfew'd Streets - Long Beach, Long Island in the Aftermath...

Speaking out of the nightmare of the evening of October 29, 2012, the poet traces the trajectory of Super-storm Sandy's impact on a community living on a stretch of barrier beach, on the south shore of Long Island. The book opens as the storm makes landfall and 'drowns' everything in its path. The poems then proceed to document the days, weeks and months that follow - the shock, the hopelessness, the coming to terms and finally, the realization that life as the community had known it, was gone.

"On the morning of October 30th, 2012, approximately twelve hours after the worst storm ever to hit the eastern seaboard swept over this barrier beach and claimed the unfathomable, the residents who remained through the harrowing hours of the night, and those who evacuated, understood as one, that home is the most sacred place of all..." Thus begins a paean to both a place and a community that found itself part of the wreckage left behind in the wake of Super-storm Sandy. In The Dark Curfew'd Streets - Long Beach, Long Island in the aftermath... seeks to capture and document the experience that a loving community bravely shared, while mourning the loss of almost everything it had known. The poems follow the trajectory of the storm, taking the reader inside that first evening as the waves, like Neptune's steeds, "rushed the shore... charged our stairwells... hammered down our doors." They move very quickly into the aftershock of the days just after, with the vision of the ghostly inhabitants carrying their irretrievable losses like limp and broken bodies, out to the curb. Months and seasons pass, but they are all one; the only change is the creeping recognition that help is not coming. Midway through the book, a space opens up, one morning offers a thread of hope, and while those who have returned "keep their porch lights lit... sometimes late into day," there is a turning.

Helen Morrissey Rizzuto, author of Evening Sky on a Japanese Screen, A Bird in Flight, and co-author of American by Choice - one man's journey, is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. She has taught at Hofstra University, Queens College, and New York State Council on the Arts Poets-in-Public-Service. She conducts private workshops in poetry, fiction, character and the illustrated journal, both in New York City and on Long Island. Her students have gone on to win prestigious prizes and publication from Random-House, Little Brown and Co. and other major publishing houses. visit her at www.helenmorrisseyrizzuto.com