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About the Prize
The winner of the 2013 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize is Abigail Cloud. Her collection, Sylph, will be published by Pleiades Press in 2014.
In collaboration with Winthrop University, Pleiades Press publishes a book of poetry a year, as determined through the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize. Judges are poets of national prominence, and the contest is co-directed by Susan Ludvigson (at Winthrop) and Wayne Miller (at the University of Central Missouri). Winning books are printed in a run of 1,000 copies and distributed through Louisiana State University Press. Guidelines for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize are available here.
To order these books, contact LSU Press at 800.861.3477 or visit their website.
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The Glacier's Wake by Katy Didden, 2013
Selected by Melissa Kwasny for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
Katy Didden’s poems take their measure from both personal and
geologic time, from knowledge gained through science and that attendant to the
heart. With precision and craft reminiscent of Bishop’s Questions of Travel,
these are field notes for an earth alive and on the move: torrents, glaciers,
volcanoes. Along the way, we visit the site of lovers buried under an avalanche
in Innsbruck, the continuous beam of light Yoko Ono built on an island near
Reykjavik, and Surtsey, the planet’s newest island. Didden has both a mathematician’s and a poet’s mind,
gauging her life against the larger processes, imagining how, in the days
before electricity, “you could mark your place in the
universe / by how you fit / among the stars.—Melissa Kwasny
Katy Didden’s remarkable first book is distinguished by a wide
range of styles poem-to-poem, a dense aural texture as well as masterful use of
rhyme generally, and heart. To say the poems have heart might seem surprising
considering the Moore-like preponderance of cold scientific diction and Buntingesque physicality—or is it Loy she’s
channeling? But Didden humanizes the elemental by
making this kind of language sing, and sneaking in moments of emotional depth
(about a glacier: “your jaw / cracks, splits a crevasse. / Little parts of you
collapse.”). That the book is elegiac (the “sky’s brightening is not the sun /
flattering you with its attention, / just the speed at which you’re spinning
west”) makes the sudden switches from iciness to warmth and back resonate all
the more. Read the final poem, “Perito Moreno
Glacier,” and you’ll have to buy the book.—Elizabeth Arnold
Informed by
uncommon attention to what is manifest—the earth, its flora, its fauna,
and its famously slippery slopes—Didden presses, with no less energy, into what isn’t seen, but is suspected. Didden’s is a capacious voice, able at once to deliver both
wit and wonder, canny insight and meditative mystery. this is the approach to
poetic vocation—a lush and laden lyric vividly voiced—that keeps me
reading, and keeps me smiling as I do so.—Scott Cairns
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Paradise, Indiana by Bruce Snider, 2012
Selected by Alice Friman for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"There's a deep and complicated life in this land's interior . . . Underneath beat a thousand fragile hearts, their sensitive, furtive gestures. Bruce Snider's version of paradise accounts for those souls, makes a haven for them amidst the roadkill and the rapeseed, among the monster trucks and holy scriptures . . . Nothing in Snider's America is ever lost: not love, not beauty, not the first furtive kisses of adolescent boys. In this paradise, no one form of pleasure takes dominion over the others." —D. A. Powell
"These powerful eloquent poems explore the difference between the place we make and the place that makes us. The landscape of erotic memory, the vista of long-ago regret join with far more plainspoken pieces of territory, such as gas pumps and cornfields and an uncle's truck bed, to make a believable and memorable world. This is a wonderful collection." —Eavan Boland
"What Snider reminds us in these achingly beautiful poems is that we can neither love nor hate the place from which we come. These places divide us 'like one of those snowy Indiana towns / with names like Paradise or Liberty.' These places remind us we are divided things, all of us divided to the very core." —C. Dale Young |
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What's This, Bombardier? by Ryan Flaherty, 2011
Selected by Alan Michael Parker for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"Beneath the wit of these poems—and wit there is in dizzying plenty—there are sobering concerns, skeptical and philosophical quandaries that, almost as if by mistake, make themselves felt. . . . Source is, no doubt, the stake—'source' . . . this adhesive thing that is Flaherty's, given to us in unsparing generosity, in serious play—not source exactly, but resource inexactly, in poems that are 'brilliant / without all the fuss of brilliance.'" —Dan Beachy-Quick
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Self-Portrait with Expletives by Kevin Clark, 2010
Selected by Martha Collins for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"Moving seamlessly between the sixties-to-mid-seventies and the present, between a sensuously lived life and a deep sense of mortality, Kevin Cark's poems perform the magic his passion dictates and his intelligence won't quite allow: an "open / closure, the kind that improvs its own end- / lessness." Lush with detail, rich with wisdom, filled with unforgettable people and held together with masterful syntax, these poems raise narrative poetry to a breathtaking new level of pleasure." —Martha Collins
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Pacific Shooter by Susan Parr, 2009
Selected by Susan Mitchell for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"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
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It was a terrible cloud at twilight by Alessandra Lynch, 2008
Selected by James Richardson for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"Some books sit down and talk to you: Alessandra Lynch’s It was a terrible cloud at twilight is a vision. You find yourself immediately in some vivid, chill season near the end of the world, maybe in the dark wood where the hardest of the fairy tales took place. Everywhere are signs, the ruins and promises of something momentous you somehow just missed or are about to encounter, and line after line there is a sight or phrase you would linger over…except that there, just ahead, is another just as fascinating. I envy and love this work for all it shows us how to feel and say. It was a terrible cloud at twilight is just about the strangest book I know that still makes perfect sense." —James Richardson
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Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees by Julianna Baggott, 2007
Selected by Linda Bierds for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees hums with attention to the act of creation. These poems are like watches that show their inner workings. . . . We see Poetry and Fiction (cast as sisters) presenting their different versions of events; an author’s elegy for an orphan poem; poetry as mother and poetry as lover. When Baggott writes, 'Everything is talking, / even the rooted irises tonguing air,'’ we want to be able to hear it too." —Matthea Harvey
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Snow House by Brian Swann, 2006
Selected by John Koethe for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"Brian Swann’s poems have been whittled from the tree of life and the acuity of his imagination into shapes and stories lovely and wise. They are full of 'blades of light,' affirming the visible beauty and the invisible mysteries of our world. He is, as he says himself, 'dazed by the everyday.' I have not read a book of poems so reverent and so delicious for a long time." —Mary Oliver
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Motherhouse by Kathleen Jesme, 2005
Selected by Thylias Moss for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"This remarkable book-length meditation is part memoir, part spiritual diary, but first and foremost, pure poem. Set in and submitted to the rigors of convent life, these lyrics shine with winter light. Jesme writes: 'my flexible voice / my ecstasy / I learn that prayer / is either silence / or song.' Few writers are as adept as she is at listening to both."—Elaine Equi |
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Lure by Nils Michals, 2004
Selected by Judy Jordan for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"Nils Michals has a marvelous knack for putting unexpected words in unexpected places—and for composing whole poems of such surprises. In these dense, rich lyric poems, he touches a wide range from the mythical to the quotidian with the same gleamingly precise sensibility. This is a striking collection that's not afraid of beauty or emotion—nor of the difficulties they have always presented to poetry." —Cole Swensen |
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The Green Girls by John Blair, 2003
Selected by Cornelius Eady for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"While art is never a wholly adequate antidote to sorrow, its consolations can be enormous, as they are in John Blair'’s beautifully nuanced and perceptive poems. Even as he leads us back through our own disenchantments, his ‘minor ecstasies of will’ remind us of all there is in the world to love. The Green Girls is luminous in its language, a collection that rewards the reader, as in the title poem, with 'whispers soaked / with the rooted strumming of trees, as light / and as muted as bare green bodies breathing in.'" —Susan Ludvigson
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A Sacrificial Zinc by Matthew Cooperman, 2001
Selected by Susan Ludvigson for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"Colloquial, cerebral, and deeply felt, the poems in A Sacrificial Zinc are an absolutely compelling mix of formal adventurousness, dazzling diction, and good story . . . Matthew Cooperman is a very funny poet who is chronically interested and interesting. When he risks straightforward sweetness, he can also break your heart."—Maggie Anderson |
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The Light in Our Houses by Al Maginnes, 2000
Selected by Betty Adcock for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"This book dares to forego the heavy-handed irony and satiric wink that are so often the chief characteristics of newer poetry . . . Al Maginnes can be dark indeed, but his gaze is finally steady and straight ahead. He is aware, awake, amazed, and alive—all the things we want from a poet—and in language that ultimately blesses with the old lyric joy." —Betty Adcock
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Strange Wood by Kevin Prufer, 1997
Selected by Andrea Hollander Budy for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize
"In poems remarkable for their unflinching wisdom, for a maturity of vision too rarely seen in a first book, Kevin Prufer reminds us of that space beyond lullaby, of the fragility of life in a world where 'everything's / the chance for flying / failing somehow,' and of loss as inevitable, the hardest truth of all--how 'the body blooms, unfolding, / then is gone.'" —Carl Phillips
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