CONGRATS to Clancy McGilligan, winner of the 2019 Novella Prize! His book, HISTORY OF AN EXECUTIONER, was chosen by Daisy Hernández.
Thanks to everyone who submitted manuscripts (nearly 180 this year) and all of the CW students, faculty, and friends of the press who were our first readers!
NEW POETRY
"Scorpio comes on fast, like a speeding star sent out from a galaxy that is both very far away and deeply here on earth, close with real things. In these poems, Bohinc relentlessly describes in pulsing and various tones a reality where loneliness is impossible and the mistakes of our age can be corrected with an instinctual elixir, where the pressures of society can be alleviated with a sweet internal and holy rage. This book is the essence of poetry: it’s necessary, everchanging, and ferocious." ––Dorothea Lasky
“'Because I go to so many / bullshit meetings all day long,' writes Katy Bohinc, 'I want / a literary song.' This is a book of love songs and songs of despair. It takes place in bad times like these. True to the title, many of Scorpio's best poems are also its scariest." ––Ariana Reines
NEW POETRY IN TRANSLATION
Odious Horizons: Some Versions of Horace
by Martin Corless-Smith
Odious Horizons ransacks and revives Horace for our contemporary world. Part translations, part re-visionings, these radical (yet often formal) lyrics offer the stoical, joyful praise for a simple life away from the insidious and toxic world of political power and material obsession. What was Roman is now American and British, and the terrifying horizonsthat were clear to Horace, the end game of greed, the downfall of the Republic, is here even more alarming as we see rivers rise and hear the drums of civil war once more.
"Odious Horizons fast-forwards Horace’s Odes, written in 23 BC, into percussive poems of today. As Horace addressed the Tiber, Maecenas or the grass of Mars, Martin Corless-Smith addresses the president, the brown Potomac, the lake of time, and Worcestershire...In luscious crossfire, with brilliant wordplay, Corless-Smith smacks down ode, the address to a particular subject meant to be sung…with masterful, acute control and unexpected ludic shifts amidst motifs of friendship, love, chronos and kairos, war and peace, and an abiding ethical insight…Odious Horizons is consummate poetry for our time." ––Norma Cole
