“Precise and evocative, these charming, perceptive poems by Alexis Czencz Belluzzi are accomplished and ready for an audience. Practicing Distance is full of small surprises that accumulate to recognitions that stay with the reader.”
~ Gary Fincke, author of Writing Letters for the Blind and The Fire Landscape.

“These poems never waver in their conviction that we are pinned between chance and cruelty. And yet, because of the speaker’s candor, humor, and fond attentive gaze at the world, we emerge hopeful, and with the exhilarated sense that disaster has been averted.”
~ Karen Holmberg, author of The Perseids

"Practicing Distance by Alexis Czenz Belluzzi is a teasingly original, finely wrought chapbook of poems, each of which takes you somewhere you least expect to go. The language is rich in captivating images and striking figurative language, and the range of subjects and modes is expansive. There are serious poems about suffering and comic poems that contain, in one instance, a damaged vibrator that makes noise while what the user desires is silence, and in another, a truck driver with a sign that reads “show me your hooters.” The distance practiced in the poems is both literal and figurative, referring sometimes to different times and places and, on other occasions, the aesthetic estrangement that occurs when the commonplace is withdrawn from the realm of perceptual habit. And there is another kind of distance, psychological, that comes between the poet and the world as a consequence of disturbing personal experiences that become recurring motifs in the book. This is a masterful, fully engaging collection."
~ Eric Trethewey, author of Evening Knowledge, and Songs and Lamentations