The CMICH Press Summit Series is thrilled to announce the winner of our second annual book contest: Solace: Poems from the Northwoods, by Patricia Killelea.
Solace was chosen by this year’s judge, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Diane Seuss (author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry: Poems, who had the following to say:
Solace: Poems from the Northwoods is a collection whose perceptions about living and dying rise from the roots of tamaracks, and trillium that “dot the hillsides like ellipsis,” the “wolf spider in her rusted beer can house,” and midsummer on Imp Lake. The speaker is awed and haunted, in equal measure, by the endangered wildness of the north. “I know you believe in the goodness / of this world, but me: I’m not so sure,” she writes, calling out the “forever / chemicals that never break down,” “the poison we can’t stop calling home.” The language is infused with the real and what it teaches, that “panfish don’t have eyelids,” that fish guts make the gardens grow, that hunger is real and “there’s no / filling up the old starvations.” There is no shortcut to what happens to a human being, a poet, willing to weather silence, to court the quiet parts of ourselves, and therefore discover the “bright stand of goldenrod a gateway for deer / leaping between this world & the next.” I have rarely read a book that so convincingly enacts the fact that the so-called middle of nowhere is somewhere, and in which language spans the rift between the reader and the poem, the poem and the place. “Those hardwoods on the logging road? Chopped down for paper. / It is the same paper you’re holding now.” In the presence of “a violence boiling across the backroads,” Solace: Poems from the Northwoods makes a case for tenderness, for being prey to beauty, even if it means being fed to the fire.
Patricia Killelea, our winning author, lives in Watersmeet, Michigan. She is the author of Counterglow (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2019) and her work has appeared in journals like Seneca Review, Quarterly West, The Common, Barzakh, and others. Patricia is Poetry Editor at Passages North and also reads poems for FENCE. She teaches at Northern Michigan University, where she currently serves as Director of the MFA Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Patricia is also a poetry filmmaker, whose work has been screened at REELpoetry International Poetry Film & Video Festival, FOTOGENIA Film Poetry & Divergent Narratives Festival, Det Poetiske Fonotek: The Nature & Culture International Poetry Film Festival, Ó Bhéal International Poetry Film Competition, and more.
Congratulations to Patricia. We look forward to sharing Solace: Poems from the Northwoods with the world!