Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award – serie

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.

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.