Description

 

No Lightsabers in the Kitchen

by John Wojtowicz

Designer’s Choice, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2025

No Lightsabers in the Kitchen explores the humor, strangeness, and gravity of parenting, partnership, and the small, meaningful rituals of everyday life. This collection is about trying to stay present, screw up a little less, and pay attention to the moments that might matter most. It’s about what happens when a dad with a soft spot for ghosts, flowering shrubs, hitchhikers, and reptiles starts writing poems instead of fixing the bathroom door.

Early Praise

A student of turtles, inchworms and grappling hooks, Walmarts and Wawas, AA, AAA and DEA, Wojtowicz is amazed to be living in the living rooms of a pack, a herd, a pride, a family he can’t believe he helped create. His astonishment explodes in “lying like a yin-yang / on a road-worn Guatemalan / blanket and fell asleep in the shade / of a Catawba rhododendron / as a nectarine sunset / juiced the Appalachian Mountains.” There may not be a Jedi in his kitchen or a Millennium Falcon in his garage, but there is so much joy in the wild domesticity of these poems, you’ll want to slow down from hyperdrive to enjoy them.

—PETER E. MURPHY, author of You Too Were Once on Fire

Reading Wojtowicz’s poetry is the gift of getting a ride when no one else will pick you up or having your toast popped and buttered as you enter the kitchen. In a world that can be confusing and difficult, Wojtowicz gives himself, his wife, his children, and you, dear reader, permission to wonder, laugh, love, explore, and imagine. You are encouraged to be followed by the moon, romance beaches, condition doorknobs, and nurse turtles, but please, no lightsabers in the kitchen– leave the ghost of you in peace.

—DIMITRI REYES, author of Papi Pichón

Full of humor and surprise, John Wojtowicz’s No Lightsabers in the Kitchen humanizes the speaker by showing his loving side as a father, despite his struggles in other areas of life. In poems like “Wild” and “Shake Your Tail Feathers,” the dad mimics a chicken at his child’s request and attends “a birthday party for an inchworm named Spike.” In John’s poems, it is as if the speaker is asking to be seen like his children see him, through impartial eyes and childhood innocence. Ultimately, John’s poetry invites us to reexamine our own relationships and listen and respond to the smaller voices in our circle who have the power to lift us up and keep us there.

—SHAWN R. JONES, author of Date of Birth

 

About the Author

John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery and still lives in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey” with his wife and two children. Currently, he teaches social work at Rowan College South Jersey. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile Podcast. Several of his poems were selected for Princeton University’s 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices exhibition at the Lewis Center for the Arts. When not writing, teaching, or rolling around in the yard, he enjoys monitoring bluebird boxes, volunteering at the Cohanzick Zoo, and flipping horseshoe crabs.