Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award – serie

Remarkable for their dark, sharp wit, their stylistic unity, and their combination of sweetness and risk, the poems in The Light in Our Houses probe the intersection of public and private history, and visit the way stories are told: ""what we have named history / was once only the braided rivers / of people's lives, currents that brimmed / fast and dangerous, then emptied / into the wide blank spill of ocean."" Voicing a disdain for conclusions, ""the gaudy clothes we wrap narrative in"", Al Maginnes writes poems that carry the weight of parables.

Green is the colour of beginnings, of memory and regeneration, of the ""fluid arc of what has been, / forever becoming us."" John Blair's debut poetry collection, The Green Girls, takes the reader on a journey through life as it explores such subjects as marriage, family, and sex. Written in several voices, from husband and wife, brother and sister, young and old, the poems remind us that paradise ""doesn't invite us back."" Although filled with sadness and pain, Blair's elegantly written free years resonates with a quiet optimism even while discussing losses and lapses that give life both its terror and its potential for redemption.

In Motherhouse, Kathleen Jesme takes the reader on a journey with a young novice through the heart of Mystery. Jesme's poems, which investigate religious life in a convent in the 1960s, are assembled from many fragments: juxtapositions of place and time (childhood and novitiate), shifting scale (the minuteness of an ""old beige comb from home,"" the boundlessness of a ""three-axled God""), and varying poetic forms. Jesme explores the hidden, the provisional, the silent -- that which does not obey the rules of the light or submit to its boundaries.An intensely lyrical work, Motherhouse is a cloth woven from disparate voices and structures, expressing both the deep divisions of the self and the longing for a whole that may be ultimately shaped.The convent, then prairie: stretchesitself across the Great Plains, grabs the bank of the Red River of the Northin one handand the Rockies in the otherand pulls: you can seeuntil your sight failsnothing elseis in the waywhere something other should bethere is only your darkeningsightresistancelike bone, filleted clean in the windwhich comesfrom everywhere.From Motherhouse by Kathleen Jesme. Copyright 2004 by Kathleen Jesme. All rights reserved.

Part primer, part credo, part arm-swinging gambol, this wonderful book is resonant with wit and insight.""-- Linda BierdsCompulsions of Silkworms and Bees takes up the tradition of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, but on poetry's own terms. At first glance, Baggott's candid counsel can be seen as a manual on writing poetry, written in poems. As the book unfolds, however, these poems take on the larger landscape of love and loss, the rigors of living fully, and the intricate, mysterious territory of our fragile, hardworking souls.

Pacific Shooter is a book of transformations as insubordinate and subversive as Ovid's Metamorphoses -- and with all the taste and twang of a new language. The bourgeois reader will hate it: there's too much magic, too much genius, too much linguistic bliss."" -- Susan Mitchell, from her judge's citation.""Susan Parr's poetry is an orchestra of rim-shots and flashbang intimacy. 'Wind a sheet around all,' she croons in this vivid collection, 'then bring into the dark this beatific twill.' Her poems pop and vibrate on armatures of spiked sonics and an intellect that twirls with dazzling humor. Awash in verbal intimacies, Parr never forgets to mean, and in doing so she's turned up the potency -- a needle of her verse has a laser's power. Pacific Shooter is the playful sweetness in our last breath, and in these pages, Parr will 'afford you / the machine: the logomotive yo-yo. Go man,' her poems clap. 'Go: yo, yo.'"" -- Alex Lemon.