Bøker i Wick Poetry First Book-serien

Winner of the 2011 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. `I have long admired Carolyn Creedon's work. Her first book is strong and vital. She is not like anyone else now publishing in our country. Her directness and immediacy make her a kind of legitimate granddaughter of the sublime Walt Whitman'. - Harold Bloom

"Surprising and moving, Gosnay's work shows us what the `clean blue sleeve' of language can do, and we are transformed and held by this book the way the speaker in the final poem is compelled by a `photograph of rose baskets in Morocco': `Nothing on earth could keep me from pressing it to my face.'"" - Angie Estes, author of Enchantee and winner of the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

The book states plainly that both its speaker and the speaker's mother have suffered near deadly head injuries. However, rather than let a taxonomy like ""family curse"" sit unquestioned, Green writes toward the fugues (the condition of having one's identity questioned) by making a kind of fugue (interweaving song).

"Melancholy and loss, the missing of a gone mother, passion and solitude - stirringly well mixed in one potent brew of a book. Readers will feel at home here, but they'll also feel ignited with new presences, keenly visible and invisible perceptions."" - Naomi Shihab Nye, judge

Winner of the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Mark Doty, Judge "It's a joy. . .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender... Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category." --Mark Doty, from the Foreword "Bendorf's collection indeed opens the door to a spectral wilderness, an otherworldly pastoral, a queer ecology endlessly transformed by possibility, grief, and the unruly wanting of our names and bodies. Stunningly lyrical and beautifully theoretical, The Spectral Wilderness is an invitation one cannot turn down; the book calls us to travel with Bendorf, to study the topography of becoming because "what we used to be matters" in the way that language matters--however fleeting, however mistaken, however contradictory it might be." --Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography "What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf's poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. 'Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open, ' he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside. The Spectral Wilderness is a wonderful book." --Ross Gay, author of Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down

The poems in this stark collection feel as if they have arrived just after casting off emotional ballast. A burden has been carried from the familiar world, and over time and distance, that load has been dispersed. And now the poet returns, halfway between grief and transcendence, but in that dark return lies hope."" - Maurice Manning

"In Leah Osowski's exquisite debut, hover over her, the poet immerses us in geographies of unrealized adolescence, where young women are singular amidst their cacophonous backdrops, whether beside a lake, inside a Dali painting, or stretched out in a flower garden." - Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

What are we to do with anger? What are we to do with love? What are we to do with one another, given all that happens and has happened between us? These are a few of the questions that haunt Matthew Minicucci's deeply original and profoundly moving poems.