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 and u0026 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.

Odessa: Poems (Lindquist and Vennum Prize for Poetry) PDF

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