Ivory Cradle: APR Honickman 1st Book Prize

Ivory Cradle is the winner of the third annual American Poetry Review /Honickman First Book Prize, as chosen by poet Robert Creeley. In his introduction, Creeley writes, "now and again one comes upon a story so quietly and articulately told that it stays in mind long after, echoing, recasting the usual frames of reference and order, making whatever it is the world had been thought to be, quite changed and even, again, unknown." Ivory Cradle is such a story as it charts a personal journey through questions of faith and history, with its anger redeemed by passion and the transformative power of art.

from "Morning in Florence"

I was out the door and halfway to the elevator
When he threatened to throw
my clothes into the lobby. With the baby to think of
I had to know when to stay or go

So I headed out alone into the consoling brown light
Off the river, feeling the child
Swimming carefully inside me as I walked to see
Fra Angelico’s frescoes in cells

Where monks once slept and knelt, contemplated
And vanished; where in rapture he worked
fast as the plaster dried to get light to wash the wall
the way God would have done it

"Ivory Cradle announces a poet fully formed, fully mature, and wild to say things in ways they’ve never been said before. Rarely, very rarely, is a so-sane heart so beautifully articulated. This is not just an exceptional first book, it is a flat-out exceptional book, period."—Thomas Lux

"Reading Anne Marie Macari’s poems I think of Jane Kenyon, in her kindred humor, quietness, fierceness, and plain integrity. But this poet is her own woman, with her own music, her own witness… These are very beautiful poems of survival, and more than survival, of the ‘flowering dark.’"—Jean Valentine

Anne Marie Macari lives in Mt. Kisco, New York.