Here are her comments on the 2013 Oregon Book Awards finalists for the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry.
Off-Key by Jean Esteve
These poems are perfect cocktails of knowledge, oddity,
brevity, humor, and rhyme. They are surprisingly subtle and stand up to being
read again and again. They also successfully belie the received notion that heavily-rhymed
poems are only useful for nursery rhymes and light verse. With each rereading,
these deftly rhymed poems seem smarter and smarter, and more wryly subversive.
Gertrude: poems and other objects by Toni Hanner
The stepping-off point for many of these poems is a love of Gertrude
Stein and her language antics, especially those found in Tender Buttons. Other poems have an announced debt to surrealism,
the early surrealism of Max Ernst and André Breton, and the contemporary
surrealism of John Yau. To whatever she has received from those who came before,
Hanner adds a lyric sensibility and creative intelligence that is entirely her
own. Each of these poems convincingly makes the argument that poetry speaks
best about the complicated experience of being human when it speaks with invention
and indirection.
Gertrude: poems and other objects by Toni Hanner
The stepping-off point for many of these poems is a love of Gertrude
Stein and her language antics, especially those found in Tender Buttons. Other poems have an announced debt to surrealism,
the early surrealism of Max Ernst and André Breton, and the contemporary
surrealism of John Yau. To whatever she has received from those who came before,
Hanner adds a lyric sensibility and creative intelligence that is entirely her
own. Each of these poems convincingly makes the argument that poetry speaks
best about the complicated experience of being human when it speaks with invention
and indirection.
Fragile Acts by Allan Peterson
These poems rarely veer far from a well-defined reality that
is often rooted in the natural world—fleabane, fish, fast clouds, osprey, and
spider—but at the center of that world, and deeply embedded in it, is a thoughtful
meditative speaker who both marvels at and raises insightful rhetorical questions
about his place among so much mystery. His observing eye, as astute as the most
finely-honed telephoto lens, is such that he’s able to
transform even the ordinary into something so exquisite it provokes wonder and
awe.
Perhaps it’s the odd deadpan-earnest tone the speaker uses to
address those large lyric subjects—love, death, and the changing of seasons
(which is, yes, simply death by another name)—that makes these small prose
poems so distinctive, and so convincing. Who would say “From the very
beginning, I knew exactly what would kill me” if he or she didn’t mean for such
a statement, which openly flaunts its implausibility, to speak figuratively about
something much larger than itself. Each of these poems is more than the
language with which it’s been constructed. Each is a seedling that is meant to
become a full-fledged allegory not on the page, but in the reader’s
imagination. Schomburg intuitively knows exactly how much, and how little, it
takes to conjure a sense of the ever-puzzling world.
Fall Ill Medicine by Carrie Seitzinger
These poems have an odd
associative logic that seems absolutely earned. Seitzinger understands that because the world is
strange, eccentricity must be employed when talking about it. Otherwise, the
poet risks being reductive, or falls into the trap of producing poetically
pretty description that comes nowhere near capturing what it’s truly like to be
alive in American at the cusp of the 21st century. The poems
brilliantly represent the ongoing struggle to make sense of the intents and behaviors
of the inscrutable others who surround us, while trying to simultaneously understand
the even less fathomable self.
Fall Ill Medicine by Carrie Seitzinger
