WINNER OF THE MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD

A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in Patricia Kirkpatrick's Odessa--selected by Peter Campion as the winner of the 2012 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry--fighting for her life.

The tumor presses against her amygdalae, the "emotional core of the self," central to the process of memory. And so a dreamlike reality emerges from these poems, emotionally charged but void of sentimentality. Kirkpatrick's Odessa, "roof of the underworld," is a refuge at once real and imagined, resembling simultaneously the Midwestern prairie and a god-inhabited city. We see a field filled with unidentifiable birds and the unknowable. A post-surgery body that can be "broken / like a piece of bread." Ceres and Hades locked in a custody battle for Persephone--and Persephone's fruit, "the color of bloodstain."

Ghostly, lyrical, and bearing shades of classical heroism, Odessa delivers a personal narrative of stunning dimension.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 12/11/2012
ISBN: 9781571314567
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.30w x 0.40d
Award: Minnesota Book Award - Winner

Review Citations: Booklist 12/15/2012 pg. 10