The Cuttingboard by Stefan Lorenzutti

24 poems by Stefan Lorenzutti
Cover graphite by Olga Pawłowska

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“Lorenzutti’s poems share some of the same qualities I’ve come to associate with [Bored Wolves’] lively, unpredictable list: an attentiveness to the intense colors, atmospheric conditions, textures and materials of everyday life; strange new precisions that give way to humor then unexpected sites of vulnerability. These are poems that make life feel weird, abundant; basically unfathomable but definitely worth living.”

—Kate Briggs, Fitzcarraldo Editions journal

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The Plum Tree

Where is my old dog?
Beneath the roots

Where is my young daughter?
Up in the branches

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From the afterword to The Cuttingboard:

Dear reader,

Slot The Cuttingboard within my ongoing Minor Weave cycle, between At Tremendous Dam and next year’s Tough As Mammoths and As Soft, which will bring together a baker’s decade of my poems and prose into one satchel. Why The Cuttingboard as a solo pamphlet now when it will soon be joining the pack?

These poems were written, often months apart, during a stretch when, fortunate enough to be publishing Bored Wolves poets year-round, I wasn’t really writing poems myself. Wasn’t really writing poems in Kraków. Wasn’t really writing poems in the Beskids. Wasn’t really writing poems in the Catskills.

Until the poet Lindsey Glass punched me in the right arm so hard I started writing with my left. Twenty-four poems ended up connecting the freckles of twice as many months. A cuttingboard isn’t a table, but you can fit a meal on a cuttingboard (like dad did, before the millennium and spaghetti, with a brown bag of provisions and his small sharp knife).

Some somber stuff this time—nagging gravel in my boot precipitating collapse—but I’m always seeking solace somewhere as a writer, including in Hudson Valley triangulations of daydreaming train station, Main St. bakery, and the last grocery store with blue corn chips and peppermint toothpaste before rugged roads.

It’s the whole reason I wrangle with poem-writing to isolate and preserve moments that snagged on my psyche—from sudden splinter to daubed balm. Then sifting, collaging, patterning across collections, thumbing open the occasional hot muffin of epiphany. Epiphany is when you say goddamn while smiling.

Stefan Lorenzutti
Kraków, March 2026

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Gas Station Batteries

My

depleted

childhood

batteries

game

boy

blue

snow

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2026
28 pages, pamphlet, 14×20 cm, b&w offset
Printed on Arctic Munken Print Cream 115
Designed by Pilar Rojo
Cover drawing by Olga Pawłowska
ISBN 78-83-965968-3-3

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Stefan Lorenzutti is a poet and publisher based in Kraków and the Polish Highlands. His books include the haibun collection Great Known: An Autobiographical Cairn and At Tremendous Dam: Some Poems 2014–2021. The Stoneware Jug, a poem-comix collaboration with John Porcellino, was published with Nieves in 2022.