Bøger i The Backwaters Prize in Poetry serien

In Stunt Heart, Mary Jo Thompson’s debut collection,a female gaze locates the ironies inside the subjects of marriage and death, loneliness and love, speaking and silence. The title plays on both sick hearts and circus tricks, and appropriately, these poems are direct, personal, and disarmingly emotive. Look at the end of the first poem, “Says Penelope,” where the speaker suddenly veers to “Newsflash: I sleep- / walk.” These stark moments of admission are used to perfection in the centerpiece sonnet series, “Thirteen Months,” the collection’s highlight. Distilled emotion over the illness and death of an estranged husband ranges in tone from the dark humor that compares the marriage to a used car to the elegiac imagery of protecting the family garden from frost. The shock of seeing the deceased in his casket looking like a cross between Clark Gable and Dracula seasons the collection, recurring in ruminations on the various ways a body is prepared at death and the story of a mother who dies while sneezing. Although no one brings back the dead by writing poetry, in Stunt Heart,Thompson revisits them with credible humor and tough dispatches from bedrooms, graveyards, and hospital hallways. Thompson’s Stunt Heart jukes, dodges, and prays while muscling through all manners of demise and in the process reveals how one can turn grief into speech, art into grieving.

A stark, visceral collection of free verse and prose poetry, Skin Memory scours a wild landscape haunted by personal tragedy and the cruel consequences of human acts in search of tenderness and regeneration. In this book of daring and introspection, John Sibley Williams considers the capriciousness of youth, the terrifying loss of cultural identity and self-identity, and what it means to live in an imperfect world. He reveals each body as made up of all bodies, histories, and shared dreams of the future. In these poems absence can be held, the body’s dust is just dust, and though childhood is but a poorly edited memory and even our well-intentioned gestures tend toward ruin, Williams nonetheless says, “I’m pretty sure, everything within us says something beautiful.” ┬á

Through sonnets and a long sequence, the poems of Two Open Doors in a Field are constructed with deliberate limitations, restlessly exploring place, desire, and spirituality.

Living Room imagines the lived reality of other organisms and kinds of life to explore the permeability of human and nonhuman experience, intelligence, language, and subjectivity, and to consider an experience of self and world that cannot be objectively quantified.

"I want a book of poems to act like a genuine book and not just a miscellany of the poet''s most recent work willy-nillied between covers. Susan Elbe''s THE MAP OF WHAT HAPPENED is just such a thoughtful, integrated collection, lovingly (and, I''m betting, painstakingly) assembled, occupying a space/time continuum all its own from beginning to end. This book is so much more than a sum of its estimable parts; there is such palpable life here because there are so many human lives in its pages. And this poet has a real stake in showing us the various ways in which they honestly matter. By the sheer power of her down-to-earth empathy and the resilience of her language, she makes her people our people, too."ΓÇôDavid Clewell, judge

"Zeina Hashem Beck crafts a multifaceted portrait of the people and the streets of Beirut. Part love-letter, part elegy, Hashem Beck''s debut collection keeps the city from becoming ''a shadow of a memory, / the memory of a shadow'' for poet and reader both, offering us instead ''labyrinths / in which we get lost on purpose.'' This collection is as vibrant and sensitive as its subjectΓÇöthe city that ''understands / not being tired of being.'' Join me in an enthusiastic welcome for a compelling new voice in Anglophone poetry."—John Hennessy

"With unflinching stanzas threaded through with grief''s relentless lyric, THE DAUGHTER''S ALMANAC is a masterwork, a deftly crafted illustration of the myriad ways beauty collides with pain. Succinct and utterly memorable, these poems take hold of the heart and tug it toward an insistent light. We are washed alive in that light. We are changed by it."—Patricia Smith, 2014 Backwaters Prize Judge

DRONE is a lyric meditation on modern warfare, in our technological and digital age. Written from a variety of perspectives and personas, it explores the human, animal, personal, and domestic aspects of the wars being fought by the US for incomprehensible reasons with indefinable outcomes. Swift and wide ranging, these poems explore experiences of soldiers, military families, prisoners, immigrants, and more.

ΓÇ£From jump, there was such sonic, emotional, and intellectual drive to these poems, that I couldnΓÇÖt resistΓÇôwhy would I want toΓÇôthe pull of Benjam├¡n Naka-Hasebe KingsleyΓÇÖs vision and sensibility. Verve and ├⌐lan are words I might use, but they lack sufficient verve and ├⌐lan. And if I wrote, ΓÇÿhis future is bright, ΓÇÿ IΓÇÖd be wrongΓÇôhis future is here, and this book is as much fire as I can ask for.ΓÇ¥ —Bob Hicok, author of Hold

Although ghosts of all kinds haunt this collection, these poems also look forward and outward into a world where social inequality and environmental disaster meet the possibility of metamorphosis.