It’s been quite a busy year for Natalie Nascenzi, as the South Kingstown native and current New York City-based writer and poet has released two books of poetry within eight months of each other this year. “Out of Chaos” came out in March, and it was followed by “The Aftermath of Unrest” in November. The books explore her battles of the mind and her mental health journey to finding balance in chaos.
“I tend to focus on a lot of topics of the human condition, and my first book is a lot about anxiety, depression and transformation, going through whatever you go through and coming out triumphant at the end of it, and then into ‘The Aftermath of Unrest,’ it was just a mix of everything, because I was writing it from this place of peace coming out of my chaos and into this pandemic,” Nascenzi said. “So a lot of the writing is about how I got my mind right, and then reality happened, like, ‘Oh my God, we’re in a pandemic.’ All of these things are happening. Now I have to deal with mentality, reality coming in.”
For Nascenzi, writing a book of her poems wasn’t always in the cards. In fact, she says, “Out of Chaos” came about almost by chance.
“So the first one was kind of, for lack of a better term, an accident,” Nascenzi said. “I hadn’t shared my work and I had compiled everything together, and, just through a series of chance encounters and meeting people, I ended up publishing the first one.”
After finishing her manuscript for “Out of Chaos,” she continued to write and the book released on March 8, just a week before the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdown quieted the city that never sleeps.
“When I had finished the manuscript for the first one, I knew I was going to do a second one kind of parallel to it, so while I was publishing the first one and performing all around the city and building my audience, I was writing my second book and still writing the story that kind of was happening. So the pandemic happens and the first book comes out, and I’m like, ‘alright, I’m not going to let this stop me, let’s keep going,’” Nascenzi said. “I spent a lot of the quarantine, especially here, walking around the city and putting myself in all of these different places of emotions and what was happening, and finishing the second book, and somehow was able to get it out this past month.”
While “Out of Chaos” deals more directly with her personal battles, a theme that carries over into “The Aftermath of Unrest,” the latter also deals a lot with chance and fate, based within Nascenzi’s own experiences while putting the book together.
“The underlying theme that is woven between the poetry is the story of my ‘poetry journey,’ I like to call it, but it has a lot to do with signs and connection points and kind of like different things will happen that remind you that you’re going in the right direction,” Nascenzi said. “So at the very end of the book, it’s this whole culmination of all of these moments, they came together to just sort of validate that I was heading in the right direction.”
One of those chance encounters happened to be with a New York-based painter named Grant McGrath, who she met before publishing her first book.
“I had met an artist while I was writing my first book, and he kind of inspired me, and was like, ‘you should share your writing,’ and then we went our separate ways and the crazy thing that happened was when I finished my second book, one of these crazy, serendipitous coincidences and just random chance encounters led me back to him and we ended up reconnecting and collaborating on the second book together,” Nascenzi said. “So it was a really cool story of fate and that people come into your life for a reason despite what’s going on in the world. If you’re meant to be on a path, it’ll happen.”
In a two-hour live session, McGrath painted a portrait of Nascenzi, which she adopted as the cover art for “The Aftermath of Unrest.”
“(It was) completely unplanned and completely from scratch, so it’s just really cool that it’s a true piece of art and the book pairs a lot of original artwork with different poems,” Nascenzi said.
Another chance encounter and connection happened with a local Manhattan park she frequented, which featured a century-old statue of a woman.
“There was this park that I had originally found while I was writing my first book, and I went there all the time to write, and I never knew what the statue meant,” Nascenzi said. “Over the course of the year I would go back, and then, when I finished my second book, I fell into the statue and it showed me her name and basically her biography was every single thing that had happened to me, it matched up.”
The statue, she found, was of Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield, a New York writer, historian, feminist and lover of the arts who was born in Little Compton, Rhode Island in 1858 and, though raised in the city, spent much of her childhood summers in the Ocean State.
“She was from Rhode Island, she was an author, she had a husband who was an artist who painted a picture of two people dancing, it was like all of these things in her biography matched exactly to all of these signs that I was experiencing to work with this person again,” Nascenzi said, describing the discovery as a “mind-blowing moment.”
She compared her journey to the one featured in the 2005 novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” in which the main character, a nine-year-old boy named Oskar, discovers a key in a vase that belonged to his father who died and then uses it to follow a series of signs to reach his end goal, which, in his case, is finding closure.
“I’m still processing it, but it’s a very cool story that’s just very hard to explain verbally because there’s so many parts to it that I break down with each chapter of the book,” Nascenzi said. “First, I introduce how it all started, and I take the reader through the story from start to finish and hit each point that needs to be remembered, so when you get to that ending of what happened at the statue, you go, ‘oh, whoa, that makes so much sense.’ It’s kind of like one of those things where it’s a treasure hunt that I was on during the pandemic all around the city.”
Having done much of the brunt of her writing for “The Aftermath of Unrest” in April, the shutdown of New York due to the COVID-19 pandemic plays a role in the book, as she details how the city that never sleeps suddenly went quiet.
“I spent a lot of time on Park Avenue, which I talk about in the book, and it was incredibly mind-blowing to see one of the busiest streets in Manhattan completely dead, like no cars in sight, and then Central Park, there’s a whole chapter all about (how) Central Park used to be a place of people and there was laughter and picnics and parties and music and then you go there and it’s an actual park, it’s silent and there’s just trees and nature and it’s like, ‘whoa,’ so it was really about how, for the first time, there was a whole different energy to New York City, because what made the city the city was this liveliness and now it was just complete silence and sadness and those emotions were heavy in the air, and so that’s what I was writing,” Nascenzi said. “It was a whole different world completely.”
New York City itself is front and center in “The Aftermath of Unrest.”
“The whole of ‘The Aftermath of Unrest’ is city-based, before each poem there’s a setup that describes the city, so it’ll be like, ‘it’s 10:00 at night, the sky is dark, for the first time in New York City I can see the stars because there’s nobody left in the city,’” Nascenzi said. “I set up the emotion with the time and place of where we are in the book, so at one point I’ll say, ‘it’s Christmastime in New York City and there’s people everywhere,’ so it jumps around to different settings.”
Nascenzi, who pre-pandemic regularly performed at open mic nights around the city, has called New York City home for the past three years, even though at first it didn’t seem like things would end up that way for the South Kingstown native and Johnson and Wales University alum, who works as a copywriter.
“After I graduated college, I moved back home and I wasn’t getting any jobs, and then, randomly, this guy at an advertising agency in New York City was like, ‘you have 24 hours to make me an ad campaign. If I like it, I’ll hire you.’ So I stayed up all night and he messaged me the next day and he was like, ‘can you be here Monday?’ so I packed all my bags (and) I moved here,” Nascenzi said. “I was only going to do this job for a month. I had a plane ticket to LA for the end of the month (and) I hated the job in New York City, I was like, ‘this is awful, I’m not doing this,’ and then on the last day of that job, the day before my flight to LA, I interviewed at another company and they were like ‘can you start Monday?’ and I’ve been here ever since.”
For her, moving to New York City was the best decision she’s ever made.
“New York City is, to me, freedom,” Nascenzi said. “To be who you are and to go out into the world and explore whatever dream or goal that you have, because everyone here is ambitious and everyone is always doing something and the energy of the city is this constant striving to be better and to do things and to go out in the world and make an impact in whatever way that you can. I think I say in ‘The Aftermath of Unrest’ that New York City is spontaneously electric in every way. There’s always something happening, and that kind of makes me feel alive, so if I hadn’t moved here, the level of transformation within myself I would say never would’ve happened. Since moving here three years ago, I’ve lost 85 pounds, I’ve written two books, I’ve become a performance poet, and really I accredit that to the City of Dreams.”
Still, parts of Rhode Island and South County live within her, such as her love of watching the sunset. Living in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Midtown Manhattan, she is easily able to do so, with a quick walk over to the banks of the East River by the Queensboro Bridge, a location she frequently photographs and posts to her own Instagram account dedicated to the subject, @nyc_sunrises.
“I can wake up every morning and I walk straight down and I’m right over the Queensboro Bridge, so it was kind of like my way of having a little bit of Rhode Island with me,” Nascenzi said. “Seeing the sunrise, even though on the other side of the river there were buildings, it still felt a little bit like home, so I started watching the sunrise everyday and it stuck with me. I started taking pictures of it and the whole point was you can look at the same thing every single day, but it’s a little bit different and it’s still just as beautiful, even though it’s the same spot. The sky is ever-changing. It’s just a place of peace. I still went there through everything that happened.”
Overall, Nascenzi’s main goal is to inspire just one person with her work.
“If I can inspire one person, then I’ve done my job and I know I’ve done enough. It means the world to me if one person can say ‘that poem was how I was feeling but I couldn’t find the words and you’ve found them for me,’” Nascenzi said. “To me, it means much more to me to help one person, to inspire one person, to get true, honest feedback and just hope through one person that it is 100, because that’s all I’m here for. I believe that if I have a gift to write about a feeling that someone needs to hear or see and they get the experience to know they’re not alone, however they’re feeling, that means the world to me. It really is just all about inspiration and I want people to know that you can do anything no matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter what you go through: you truly are capable of whatever it is you want. You just have to be strong enough to not give up on yourself.”
Nascenzi also says that the Nov. 11 release of “The Aftermath of Unrest” was just its soft release, and she has more plans for it in 2021.
“We’ve got a lot of exciting things coming up with audio, visuals, music, art, there’s a lot of things in the works, so come 2021, that’s when the true rollout of all of the projects is happening,” Nascenzi said.
After releasing two books in under a year, Nascenzi doesn’t see a third book coming quite yet, but she is looking forward to performing and sharing more with the world to complete her personal mission.
My mission is to promote hope and I just want to inspire,” Nascenzi said. “It’s most important for me for people to know that it’s okay to not be okay and speak your truth and just do the damn thing. If you want to do something, just do it and trust yourself and trust your path and everything will work out in the end.”
Both “Out of Chaos” and “The Aftermath of Unrest” are available for sale on her website, natalienascenzi.com, and through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
For more information on Nascenzi and her work, visit natalienascenzi.com.
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SK native, poet looks within for second book of 2020 - The Independent
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