Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry – serie

Recapturing the celebratory voice of Africa in poems that are both contemporary and traditional, Liberian-born Patricia Jabbeh Wesley weaves lyrical storytelling with oral history and images of Africa and America, revealing powerful insights about the relationship between strength and tragedy. Rooted in myths that can be traced to the Grebo tradition, Becoming Ebony portrays Wesley's childhood experiences of village talk and civil war, as well as her adult experiences of the pain of her mother's death and the difficulties of rearing a family away from home in the United States. Turning on the African proverb of ""the wandering child"" and the metaphor of the ebony tree - beautiful in life and death - these poems delve into issues of human suffering and survival, chronicling what happens ""after the sap is gone.

In her first collection of poems, Kansas native Amy Fleury captures images of dragging clotheslines, baked lawns, and sweet potato babies, inserting them with an earnest dignity into her stories of midwestern life.

Taking its concept of concentricity from the eponymous Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, Circle, the first collection from Victoria Chang, adopts the shape as a trope for gender, family, and history. These lyrical, narrative, and hybrid poems trace the spiral trajectory of womanhood and growth and plot the progression of self as it ebbs away from and returns to its roots in an Asian American family and context. Locating human desire within the helixes of politics, society, and war, Chang skillfully draws arcs between T'ang Dynasty suicides and Alfred Hitchcock leading ladies, between the Hong Kong Flower Lounge and an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch, the Rape of Nanking and civilian casualties in Iraq.

In works whose subjects range from the religious to the carnal, the whimsical to the foreboding, Jennifer Maier's debut collection of poems, ""Dark Alphabet"", explores the everyday mysteries of our common experience with humor, lucidity, and an unblinking yet compassionate eye. Whether occasioned by a song overheard on the car radio, a packet of risque postcards from the 1920's, a conversation with a dead parent, or the behavior of ducks in mating season, each poem sets off on a journey that ranges far from its origins, arriving with the reader in a clearing at dusk, in a place of wise good humor and somber grace.