Things are Happening (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

The inaugural winner of the annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award.

Literature & Fiction

Beckman, Joshua

Poetry

American Poetry Review

APR First Book Prize winner. Energetic language and mature presence mark this beautiful, disturbing debut.

Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

Pavlić, Ed

Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book.
In her introduction Adrienne Rich describes Paraph of Bone &amp; Other Kinds of Blue, as "a fully conceived book, speaking as a whole from the first lines to the last... Mr. Pavlic has listened closely to our most profound American art, the blues and jazz, and that music has not only helped him achieve poetic form but allowed him to explore a mesh of experience extraneous to literary theories... This is intimate and soulful work, breathing, brushing, and tonguing its instrument."
In response to Charlie Parker's theory of art, "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn," Ed Pavlic breathes exuberant life into his poetry through rigorous attention to overlapping facets of language—visual, tonal, rhythmic.
from "Confessions of a Piano Roll Lover":
&amp; this new player, he's just a boy. Well drilled, won't allow his thumb to drag behind his index finger. Mistakes won't leave exit wounds, or bloom in his lapel until they're his alone. Grown. With a pocket Full of rock salt in his gait, &amp; jalapeño beard.
Ed Pavlic received his BA and MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a PhD from Indiana University. He currently teach in the English Department at Union College in Schenectady, NY. His work has appeared in African American Review, Doubletake, The Black Warrior Review and elsewhere. His critical book, Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Modernism is forthcoming in 2002. He lives in Schenectady, NY.

Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Poems)

Ed Pavlić

"Tomás Q. Morín's poems are as infectious and spooky and darkly humorous as the Brothers Grimm, as shapely and colloquial and eloquent as John Donne, and as skeptical and addicted to history-as-fable as Zbigniew Herbert."--Tom Sleigh, from the introduction "An energetic and moving book of fantasias and elegies."--Edward Hirsch Selected from over one thousand manuscripts for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Tomás Q. Morín's debut is rich with the mastery of Morín's lush storytelling. From war-torn images of Eastern Europe in the mid-1900s to modern-day glimpses of the American southwest, these poems are bold and brightly imagined. From "Castrato": What do you call a gifted soprano with no balls who is too ugly to play the heroine, is never tall enough for the role of the hero? Wait a quarter century and you can fast forward past the floggings, the endless sermons, the giggles under alders with curious girls, busted noses, carped sisters with chubby boys, the innumerable nights of sleeplessness. Better to skip all this unpleasantness and descend the last rise toward the coast where you can stroll the docks in the short light of winter, get lost in the cloudbank, let the sea ripen in your hair, scan the flat water for the handsome young men . . .

A Larger Country (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

Tomas Q. Morin

United States

"A child is very ill; there is a hospital. . . . The subject is as basic as a bowl and a nail, wood and a house, and a house on fire." --Fanny Howe, from the introductionHouse and Fire is a mother's love song to her stricken young son, written over the years of his hospitalizations for an acute immune disorder. Maria Hummel is a poet of dazzling formal mastery, whose eerie, radiant lyrics and stories evoke the pediatric ward, California life, and the immortal, endangered world of childhood. This unforgettable debut was selected by Fanny Howe.From "House and Fire":THE TREEwhich was in equal parts earth and sky is now in equal parts house and fireA former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Maria Hummel is the author of two novels and poetry and prose in Poetry, Narrative, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. She teaches at the University of Vermont.Fanny Howe has written many books of poetry, and her Selected Poems (UC Press, 2000) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

House and Fire (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

Hummel, Maria

Katherine Bode-Lang's fierce and lyrical poems undertake the reformation of family mythology, place, and loves that each life requires to become its own. As Stephen Dunn notes in his introduction, "One of the classic tricks of actors is when you want to get the attention of your audience, you lower, not raise, your voice. Katherine Bode-Lang's work is not a trick--her lowered voice kept attracting me." Mending I spent that summer tucked behind the library's stacks with broken books, repairing bends and tatters, erasing pencil marks, tipping in the missing pages. Old books, weak and torn books, all came to my table-- covers like rags. I undressed them further: removed battered cloth with cuts through the spine and name, down inside joints still holding flapping limbs to well-stitched pages. Once undone, I would fashion a cast--red, green, black, or blue-- cut cloth and bristol board, build a new spine, fasten on the covers with a batch of glue I made that week. The dressing so fitted, I would paint pages back together, layer tissue over tears, splint the bent corners, slip waxed paper under the eyelids of the book. In my windowless room, a ward of old books lay quiet, pinned and drying between bricks and boards. My handwriting later named them, numbered and tagged them, sent them back to metal shelves. Katherine Bode-Lang earned her MFA at Penn State, where she is IT Trainer in the Office for Research Protections. She lives in central Pennsylvania.

The Reformation (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

Bode-Lang, Katherine

Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, with an introduction by Brenda Hillman.

Totem (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

Gregory Pardlo

“Gregory Pardlo . . . wants to explore the druidic function of art, the works of jazz musicians, painters, poets, and others who live imaginatively, expand reality, and make imagination free.”—Brenda Hillman, from the introduction
 Totem, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is the debut of a poet who has been listening for decades. In his youth, Gregory Pardlo heard stories of factory hours and picket lines from his father; in the bars, clubs, and on the radio he listens to jazz and blues, the rhythms, beats, and aspirations of which all of which seep into his poems.
A former Cave Canem fellow, Pardlo creates work that is deeply autobiographical, drifting between childhood and adult life. He speaks a language simultaneously urban and highbrow, seamlessly switching from art analysis to sneakers hung over the telephone lines. Deeply rooted in a blue-collar world, he produces snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.
 From “Vincent’s Shoes”:
 On the wall above my desk: a pen and ink affair which I copied from a print hanging in the sushi bar down the block: inflected necks of pedestrians on a bridge in the rain and here I hung the hightops from a power line. It was in me to do. I felt it in my gut the way Vincent might have felt the wheat fields and the smoking socket of the sun rattling, tweezed days late into the ear of an aluminum bowl
 Gregory Pardlo teaches at Medgar Evers College, The City University of New York, and lives in Brooklyn.

Pardlo, Gregory

Winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award.
Matthew Dickman’s all-American poems are the epitome of the pleasure principle; as clever as they are, they refuse to have ulterior intellectual pretensions; really, I think, they are spiritual in characterfree and easy and unself-conscious, lusty, full of sensuous aspiration. . . . We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds.”Tony Hoagland, APR/Honickman First Book Prize judge
"Dickman crystallizes and celebrates human contact, reminding us...that our best memories, those most worth holding on to, those that might save us, will be memories of love....The background, then, is a downbeat America resolutely of the moment; the style, though, looks back to the singing free verse of Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara....(Dickman's) work sings with all the crazy vereve of the West." Los Angeles Times
"Toughness with a smile....(Dickman) breathes the air of Whitman, Kerouac, O'Hara, and Koch, each of whom pushed against the grain of what poetry and writing was supposed to be in their times." New Haven Review
All American Poem plumbs the ecstatic nature of our daily lives. In these unhermetic poems, pop culture and the sacred go hand in hand. As Matthew Dickman said in an interview, he wants the people from the community that I come from”a blue-collar neighborhood in Portland, Oregonto get his poems. Also, I decided to include anything I wanted in my poems. . . . Pepsi, McDonald’s, the word ass.’”
There is no one to save us because there is no need to be saved. I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress covered in a million beads slinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life, I take her hand in mine. I spin her out and bring her in. This is the almond grove in the dark slow dance. It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping for joy . . .
Matthew Dickman is the winner of the May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a poetry editor of Tin House, and the coauthor, with brother Michael Dickman, of 50 American Plays. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

All-American Poem (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

Dickman, Matthew

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Books by American Poetry Review

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Things are Happening (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

Things are Happening (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Poems)

A Larger Country (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

House and Fire (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

The Reformation (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

Totem (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

Totem (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

All-American Poem (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)