Sara Ries Dziekonski

Sara Ries Dziekonski was Runner-Up for the 2024 Press 53 Award for Poetry for her manuscript, Today’s Specials. Sara is a Buffalo native and holds an MFA in poetry from Chatham University. Her first book, Come In, We're Open, won the 2009 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. Her chapbooks include Snow Angels (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Marrying Maracuyá (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2021), which won the Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Slipstream, Potomac Review, SWWIM Every Day, Connecticut River Review, and LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, among others. She is the co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing and Submission Services and teaches creative writing with Keep St. Pete Lit.

[Sara Ries Dziekonski] unveils truths of a family-run restaurant from the other side of your diner dinner plate. I could smell the food buried in the tension. The pace, the teamwork, the interaction with customers, both good and bad, become a solid core of the poet’s diner-sized revelations. Her poems made me hungry for more.

—Tom Lombardo, Press 53 Poetry Series Editor and judge for the Press 53 Award for Poetry

Praise for Today’s Specials

Today’s Specials promise to nourish us—readers, poets, workers, observers and the unobserved, servers and regulars, all who harbor truckers’ souls—far longer than today; for all those united around the diner counter, dreams are replenished on “steel clanks” and “grease shine.” This collection is an exquisite “prayer for diners” everywhere, for those who need good words to sustain us, and like the generations who cherish the little red diner, we will “forever go back” to Sara Ries Dziekonski’s words.

—Lake Angela, author of Scivias Choreomaniae

I was expecting a rosy picture: a more idyllic love for all things diner. Instead, Sara paints with “raw hands” and “hard spatula scrapes.” In steaming mugs, we see the flickering reflection of a history too often ignored.

—Michael Engle, co-author of Diners of New York

This is a world of loud talkers and interrupters . . . details served quick and hot . . . the stubborn heroism of the poet’s father continuing to cook while the diner is on fire, refusing to give up on a customer’s order. Intrepidly, Sara Ries Dziekonski is able to find a full-bellied beauty in this hardscrabble life.

—Michael Simms, author of Strange Meadowlark

I adore Sara Ries Dziekonski’s sensitive memoir-in-poems cum ode to the family diner—complete with coffee and specials and grease stains and delicious descriptions of the regulars and of her family. This book is as open and full of love as its title, and as Sara says to a friend: “Listen:/ there are a thousand ways to keep on dancing/ And/ it’s not nearly time to become a bird.” Perfectly put, because for her friend, and her, and for all the rest of us, she’s right.

—Lola Haskins, author of Homelight

In Today’s Specials, Sara Ries Dziekonski writes, “I’m a daughter of the diner,” and these poems reflect that familial link—her family who runs the diner, and the customers who frequent it. She is our trusty guide, giving us the insider’s perspective. As a waitress, she keeps a sharp eye on everything. As a poet, she turns that sharp eye into description so rich and vivid, it’s almost startling. She has an ear for dialogue, and a nose for the stories beneath the stories. This is the best book of poems about work that I’ve read in a long, long time. Here’s a tip: This book has an important, often neglected, story to tell, and we all better listen, damn it. 

—Jim Daniels, author of Comment Card