Four Lakes Prize in Poetry – serie

The poems in this book inhabit a world uneasily familiar and promising, but from the distance of a few possibilities into the future. In this collection of sharp, hallucinatory, and often darkly humorous poems, a lost man wanders among the towns of people who can't remember what they named the children, how to find each other's porches, or whether their buildings are still intact. That's why they need the person with the loupe. Among the poems where doorknobs emit the daily news, stone angels fall from the sky, and the floating world's harvest is whatever swims too close, the person with the loupe steadfastly verifies only what can be measured, while the lost man is witness to the unquantifiable and the limitless. And throughout, precise and observant language leads us expertly into the gorgeous, precarious wilderness of The Declarable Future.

Winner of the 2014 Four Lakes Poetry Prize.What if ruin is a good thing? What if each day is built on the ruin of the one before? What if all our attempts to avoid ruin only make us bitter or closed off from what’s around us? What if only by exploring our ruins do we become human?The poems in Otherwise Unseeable examine such questions. It is a poetry full of music and surprise, in voices that are personal, invented, and historical, sometimes belonging to the poet and sometimes to others. Betsy Sholl probes what there is still to learn from the devastations of the twentieth century, and she explores the roots of human envy, greed, and generosity in lively, unexpected ways, enacting the kinds of arguments we have with ourselves: between control and relinquishment, grief and ecstasy, regret and acceptance, faith and skepticism. The end result is a book of verbal wrestling, a girl-Jacob mixing it up with one kind of angel or another, limping for sure, but still blessed.