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Please join us as The Poetry Center celebrates the publication launch of the winning book for the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award with a reading by the winning poet and finalists.
The winning 2024 poet is Suzanne Cleary for her manuscript The Odds. Her collection has been published by NYQ Books. This award includes a $5,000 prize, 25 author copies, and a featured reading at the book’s release.
"Suzanne Cleary does, as Wordsworth wrote, see into the life of things. The language of her poetry is clear as just-washed windows&emdash;or maybe I should say an open window, because I feel as though there's no distance between the scenes that Cleary delivers and me. With compelling detail and surprising turns, she considers the odds of our very survival, of maintaining our delicate balance of being "breakable but never broken." These poems offer a poignant tenderness in encounters with art, literature, history, and memory, small moments of transformation, "like a tear in fabric, through which light passes." This is a poet who reminds us"Attention is love," and I love these poems. "
—Ellen Bass (author of Indigo)"Suzanne Cleary's The Odds speaks of the tender moments of unknowing in all of us. In sure-footed lines, these poems cover great distance: from the foibles we all experience to our dreams of bigger worlds. This moving collection creates breath, and room to travel between worlds as we speak to the dead as well as the living."
—Jan Beatty (author of Dragstripping)"Suzanne Cleary's poems brim with curiosity, insight, and humor, each a testament to keen observation and ready imagination. She writes about a worry stone, a green glove, a young poet waiting in line for his mother's prescription, about artists and actors, and lesser-known others we must remember. She is a poet who takes us somewhere we've never been and want to stay."
—Mara Bergman (author of The Night We Were Dylan Thomas)
The five finalists and their manuscript titles are: Rowhome in Flickering Light, Daniel Donaghy; A Brief History of My Sex Life, Subhaga Crystal Bacon; BREASTS/MOM Emily Hyland; Smolder, Colleen Morton Busch; All the Wrong Things, Susan Rothbard.
There will be a catered reception at the Poetry Center at PCCC in Paterson starting noon. The reading by Suzamme Cleary will begin there at 1 pm and will also include readings by finalists Colleen Morton Busch and Susan Rothbard.
The event is free and open to the public.
See the Poetry Center website for information, directions, and parking.
Visit laurabosspoetryfoundation.org for information on the Foundation’s work, the manuscript award, and the poetry magazine Lips.
(from top left) Cleary, Bacon, Busch, Hyland, Donaghy, Rothbard
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