A Book of Bothersome Cats is now Released for Pre-order

 My illustrated book of rhymes for anthropomorphic cats, A Book of Bothersome Cats is now ready for pre-order. This book was largely created last spring, while I was preparing to go to Romania. Follow the link to order a copy. Here is some advance praise from my very generous dust jacket blurb writers: 

“Janet Kozachek dares us to underestimate her. Light verse? Anthropomorphic cats? Listen and look deeply into this beautiful book for all the layers the author has laid for us like gentle surprises. Tucked into corners and borders, the delight lies in the details: Procrastinator Cat’s bedside reading; Bully Cat’s elaborate jacket; the Guru Cat sitting on a rattlesnake; a cigar held in the paw of the floofy Fat Cat; suggestive portraits on Proper Cat’s dining room wall; and my favorite, the marvelous, coiling tunnel to the rabbit underground of Conspiracy Cat.The author sets an expectation for twists at the turn of every page. 

As a polymath and multi-artist, Kozachek has way too much understanding and artistic ammunition to take her magnificently annoying array of cats less seriously. Her book has both softness and claws, and her wry, rhyming wit also holds compassion for human folly.

In the tradition of Eliot and Lear, A Book of Bothersome Cats sent this pandemic reader laughing back to Stanley Kunitz’s more serious concerns. In our darkest days, he advised us, “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Kozachek’s book howls quietly, with a big, silent grin and a twitching tail that does not go away.” 

– William Epes, founder of the online arts resource group “strand line break,” host of the multi-arts, open mic series Tuesday Duets.

"Janet Kozachek’s A Book of Bothersome Cats, a sequel to her Book of Marvelous Cats, is playful and fun. Its rhymes and colorful feline characters make it seem suited to children, but the foibles and flaws the bothersome cats possess are decidedly adult maladies. Her illustrations, as always, are precise and intricate, inviting long study to encourage appreciation of every detail. Like all cats, the bothersome cats are complicated characters who are nevertheless endearing and well worth getting to know.”

  –  JoAngela Edwins, Ph.D. Professor of English, Francis Marion University.

 Poet Laureate of the Pee Dee Region of South Carolina. Author, Play. Winner of the SC Academy of Authors' Carrie McCray Nickens Poetry Fellowship, Pushcart Prize.

“A famous artist once said that art was a poem without words. A famous poet once said that poets create art with words.  In A Book of Bothersome Cats, Janet Kozachek does both.  I encourage you to buy this book; in fact, buy several and give them as gifts." 

– Al Black, Founder and President of Mind Gravy Poetry, author of I Only Left for Tea and Man with Two Shadows; co-editor of Poets Respond to Race.

Romanian Stumps in an Orangeburg Field: Charcoal Drawings on Two Continents

 Many artists bravely paint or draw outdoors no matter the weather. I’m not one of them. I do sketch plein air, circumstances permitting, but mostly in order to obtain an impression or idea of a place. The details are then preserved in my cell phone or camera for later reference. There are some benefits to this method, apart from the comfort of creating art in a home studio. Not having the actual object or scene in front of me allows for some imaginative filling in.

These two large charcoal drawings were initially studies of tree stumps that I made in Iasi, Romania. One of the stumps had a strange rusty metal circle and spike attached to it. I could not figure out what its purpose may have originally been, but it most certainly had a threatening look. Was it a defunct instrument for hanging a clothes line? A public art work? Strangely enough, as I saw more such metal attachments to other trees around town it made the latter explanation possible. Some of these impromptu metal sculptures did seem to echo the particular angles of branches. 

I drew the Romanian tree stumps while sitting on the grass until I grew tired and hungry, this effect coming on before my drawing was finished. The drawings weren’t brought out again to finish until my return to Orangeburg, South Carolina. Driving through the countryside in Orangeburg County, my husband and I chanced upon a newly cleared field full of torn stumps and exposed abandoned sheds and homesteads. Needing something for the background for my Romanian tree stumps, I made photographic notes of these and then later applied them to the Romanian scenes. Romanian stumps in an Orangeburg field. Who would even guess? The old canard that people are essentially the same throughout the world also applies to tree stumps.