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Tomorrow's Living Room, Jason Whitmarsh
Tomorrow's Living Room, Jason Whitmarsh
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 13, with foreward by Billy Collins. Tomorrow's Living Room offers a pleasantly disorienting verbal territory. The collection is alternately wry and dark, hopeful and bleak, full of unexpected light and laugh-out-loud incongruities. We begin to see that the shape and the furniture of Jason Whitmarsh's world reflect our own world (and may in fact be universal), but we're considering them through completely new terms of engagement.
Mrs. Ramsay's Knee, Utah State University Press
Mrs. Ramsay's Knee, Utah State University Press
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 12, with foreward by Harold Bloom. Mrs. Ramsay's Knee offers fresh and elegant poems by Idris Anderson, many of them ekphrastic considerations of visual works of art. Among her subjects are paintings by Rembrandt, Rousseau, Pollock, and Chagall, yet she equally explores a set of news photos from the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
Neck Of The World, Daniel F. Rzicznek
Neck Of The World, Daniel F. Rzicznek
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 11, with foreward by Alice Quinn. Neck of the World is the eleventh volume in the prestigious May Swenson Poetry Award series. In it, Daniel Rzicznek offers poems that, in quick angular language, capture the natural world and at the same time extend it into a surreal vision, sometimes dream-like, sometimes dark. Alice Quinn, judge for the 2007 Swenson Award, says this of Rzicznek's work: "Throughout, the language pulsates, always vigorous, by turns knotty and crystalline. . . . In Neck of the World, we have a poet with a striking new vision--challenging, rewarding, and …
Haywire, Utah State University Press
Haywire, Utah State University Press
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 10, with foreward by Edward Field. "This poet, you knew from his very first lines, didn't fall for anything phony—his own language is irresistibly no-bullshit down to earth, even sassy.... Coming from one of the ethnic, industrial cities, his work has a gritty element. He recalls all the sorrows of a life—the drunken father, the parents' divorce, his mother's death, his unremitting horniness, his own divorce—nothing special, just what we all have to deal with one way or another. And yet he ends on an almost contented note. Haywire is remarkable for being an essentially …
The Beautiful Lesson Of The I, Utah State University Press
The Beautiful Lesson Of The I, Utah State University Press
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 9, with foreward by Rachel Hadas. Frances Brent's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Notre Dame Review, Yale Review, and in many other journals. She was born in Chicago and was educated at Barnard College. She studied poetry at Columbia University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. From 1984-1991 she co-edited the literary journal Formations. In 1987 she co-translated Beyond the Limit: poems by Irina Ratushinska-ya She has taught at Yale, Northwestern, Loyola University, and Barat College. She lives with her family in New Haven.
Where She Always Was, Frannie Lindsay
Where She Always Was, Frannie Lindsay
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 8, with foreward by J. D. McClatchy. In his Foreword, McClatchy speaks of the musical qualities of Lindsay's work: "It is impossible, reading her poems, not to hear a musical hand at work. This is not just a matter of delicacy or virtuosity. It is also a matter of knowing how to phrase a line... Lindsay moves from detail to trope with utter poise, with an intuitive sense of what to sustain or emphasize. Her language is crisp. I can pick a stanza at random... and praise its plosive energy, its modulated vowels, its variety …
She Took Off Her Wings And Shoes, Utah State University Press
She Took Off Her Wings And Shoes, Utah State University Press
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 7, with foreward by Alicia Ostriker. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, Ms. Bishop's credits include publications in Antioch Review, 13th Moon, Eratica, Aries, The Little Magazine, and many other literary journals. As a poet and writing teacher, she gives many readings, as well as workshops for gifted children, seniors, and other writers on the US-Mexico border; she has worked with at-risk youth and with the rural Hispanic community.
The Owl Question, Faith Shearin
The Owl Question, Faith Shearin
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 6, with foreward by Mark Doty. The Owl Question underscores and relishes life's transitions from young girl to woman, from child to wife to mother, and from isolation to connection this poet's bright sense of abundance and awe, here expressed in finely tuned detail and refreshingly open observation, reads like a collective memory. Though private and closely held, these questionings are as familiar as our own souls, and in their transformation to poetry, Shearin has created the very "map" she wishes to guide her when she "can't learn the world fast enough."
Borgo Of The Holy Ghost, Stephen Mcleod
Borgo Of The Holy Ghost, Stephen Mcleod
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 5, with foreward by Richard Howard. An accomplished poet with credits in such literary magazines as APR, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and many others, Stephen McLeod is the 2001 recipient of the May Swenson Poetry Award. Judge for the competition was Richard Howard, internationally known poet and winner of the Pulitzer and many other poetry awards. Formerly of Dallas, Mr. McLeod lives in Brooklyn, where he is an Assistant District Attorney. He was educated at Southern Methodist University, Columbia University, and the Fordham University School of Law.
All That Divides Us, Utah State University Press
All That Divides Us, Utah State University Press
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 4, with foreward by Maxine Kumin. Although the poems in this collection are not narrative, they do present a narrative, gradually unspooling the tale of the poet's rebel aunt, who left the family "to marry a Chinaman" in the 1930s. It's an old story, full of poignancy, mystery, family pride, and doubt. When the aunt returns to die, the poet, now grown, discovers in herself the need to reclaim the connections that her family had severed. She travels to China several times—to learn. Gradually, through wide-eyed insightful poems, we see the poet rebuild with her …
Necessary Light, Utah State University Press
Necessary Light, Utah State University Press
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 3, with foreward by Mary Oliver. "I think the two attributes that will most impress readers are, first, the almost shimmering gladness with which Ms. Fargnoli replies to the gifts of beauty and of human love; and, second, the compassion with which she addresses whatever is beyond her own intimate surroundings. Whatever it costs her, whatever it takes, there seems to be for Ms. Fargnoli only one world and only one way to live within it: with a ferocity of attention, care, and response." Mary Oliver
Hammered Dulcimer, Lisa Williams
Hammered Dulcimer, Lisa Williams
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 2, with foreward by John Hollander. Lisa William's poems are infused with what John Hollander calls "a guarded wonder." A poet of unique vision, she seems always to be "looking at," with special attention to the experience of the senses. Moreover, Williams is equally concerned with epistemology—the how of seeing. And it is perhaps this quality of attention that informs her interest in the formulations of poetry itself, in its constructed dimension. Her control of the line, of rhythmic possibilities, of structures both formal and free, is evident in every poem. Together, William's original voice …
Plato's Breath, Utah State University Press
Plato's Breath, Utah State University Press
Swenson Poetry Award Winners
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 1 with foreward by Herbert Leibowitz. Freisinger's new poetry collection is inhabited alike by bright, tangible images and thoughtful, intricate meditations. Pumpkins, poultry houses, sperm tests, a vacuum cleaner salesman, a father's damaged brain, an anatomist's tools, a baby falling from a fourth-story window-all of these come to the page distinct and palpable. At the same time, the work finds a central inspiration in theoretical work like Jeremy Rifkin's social criticism. Poetry of both the mind and the heart, Plato's Breath embraces the power of imagination to transform the ordinary into an extraordinary affirmation of …