David Lazar extends the language of prose poetry, mixing the classical and the high modern, the song and dance man and the Odyssean. Nothing, he finds, is as far apart as we think, except for the chaos and order, innocence and experience. Lazar’s voice is a sacred last resort: something’s gotta give.
The voice in these poems is semi-autobiographical and performative: masked yet emotionally raw. Each poem draws on the features of modernist poetry, using an arch, cadenced sentence as its primary unit, but drawing on the Iliad, Odyssey , and other classical myths as part of its internal cosmos.
Amy Newman is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently On This Day in Poetry History. Her other books include Dear Editor, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award, fall, Camera Lyrica, winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, and her first book, Order, or Disorder, which received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Hotel Amerika, and in anthologies including The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide To Prose Poetry, An Introduction To The Prose Poem, and The Hide-and-Seek Muse. She’s won a fellowship to The MacDowell Arts Colony and state arts grants in Ohio and Illinois, and recently was awarded the Friends of Literature Prize from Poetry for her poem “Howl.” She teaches at Northern Illinois University.
