Zoom: Washington Prize, cartea 2017

Winner of the 2017 Washington Prize. These prose poems bubble and sizzle with the anxieties of our age and torqued linguistic wordplay, conveying both our terrors and our longings. Love is confusing, the world seems to be crumbling, and yet--and yet The poet and her reader still somehow come out on top, with a long view into a future where we have held ourselves accountable and learned not just to "fix things" but to sing again.

According to Maureen Seaton, "These poems should be patented for their outrageous velocity, their skin-tight turns and re-turns, their windows into a mind sharp with fever. They should not be sequestered in a tower, not hidden in a velvet box with jewelry and baby teeth. They should not be eaten whole. If eaten whole, they should be accompanied by oboes. This is absolutely one of the wildest, most tender, most sacred collections of poems in our world today. From all and every point of view, Susan Lewis creates a stunning vision that opens up our weary weeping minds to heal."

Ilya Kaminsky praises this latest addition to Lewis's work. "The way this book deploys the English language to reveal the music of deeper meaning is simply gorgeous. 'In praise of miscommunication and her co-star, depending. Trying not to stare at the posterior pronation of their disregard.' Reading, I was thinking of G. Hill's early prose poems, their rhetorical marvels. And, of GC Waldrep's prose poems. How beautifully the emotional registers find their way into the speech of the prose poem-format: 'The enemy grinning in your prismatic heart. Fingering the molecular furnace. Hot & bothered. Throbbing towards correspondence, the irrepressible hope of fit.'"

Rae Armantrout says, "Zoom is a post-perspectival report on current conditions, written from the spot where the Anthropocene meets the obscene. It's a bleak, funny litany of non-viable positions - ground zero crumbling beneath flying feet. There are so many good sentences here I'm tempted to quote them: 'Underestimate the risk or die trying.'"