The judge in poetry for the
2009 Oregon Book Awards was
Matthea Harvey. Matthea Harvey is the author of
Sad Little Breathing Machine and
Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form. Her third book of poems,
Modern Life, was a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book.
Here are her comments on this year's finalists:
Matthew Dickman for
All-American Poem:
Matthew Dickman’s
All-American Poem, is a terrific book, crammed with odes, incantations, riffs, elegies and hybrids of them all. The voice in these poems moves between registers of emotion as if there were no divisions at all, mixing anecdote, fact and speculation and somehow making these wide-ranging poems cohere. Some of the magic is in the specifics, in Dickman’s delight in detail: “I see how we are with each other. / I see how we act. It’s not the world / with its ten zillion things we should be grasping, / but the sincerity of penguins, the mess we made of the roses.” Some of it may be the intimacy one feels listening in on the mind in “V,” where the speaker sees a girl wearing a t-shirt “that says / TALK NERDY TO ME,” and
follows with fifty lines of thinking about how best to do just that. These poems are brash, exuberant, and utterly memorable.
Alicia Cohen for
Debts and Obligations:
Alicia Cohen’s
Debts and Obligations is an innovative and innervating
book. After reading it, you feel like you have formed new neural
connections (or perhaps re-formed ancient ones) regarding modern
humans and the natural world. In the poem “Second Lithuanian Bear
Boy,” Cohen starts by pointing to the cellular similarities shared by
animals and humans “first there were single cells / then
complexities” and concludes with a historical list of children raised
by animals: “lost Lobo Girl of Devil’s River / Third Sultanpur Wolf-
Boy / Ape-Child of Tehran.” In another poem, “Vacation,” the world
itself becomes human: “the thin skin covering a spinning globe /
everything is / hot at its core.” And in a poem, titled “Le Bateau
Ivre” (after Rimbaud’s poem written in the voice of a drunken boat), there is a moment of self-consciousness, “he awoke when I quote quote quoted him” which is part irony, part acknowledgement of influence and —because of what comes before and after—also the song of a strange new bird.
Endi Bogue Hartigan for
One Sun Storm:
Endi Bogue Hartigan’s
One Sun Storm is a book of eruptions,
avalanches, exaggeration and imagination. There is a sense of quiet
and sometimes deadpan observation in these poems, which is all the
more striking because what is observed often quickly undercut and
questioned. The tigers in “Tiger Entries” are there, not there, then
through not being there, there again: “I said I want to encompass
tigers, I’ll encompass tigers. But still there were no tigers and I
gave up, thought here is a world without tigers, and I walked through
the field without tigers and because there were no tigers, I knew
tigers.” Hartigan frequently employs syntactic repetition and
listing, as if she were laying out Tarot Cards and refusing to
interpret them for us. The Tabor Diary, a series of haiku, has a
similarly light touch: “Diaries burning / will always be diaries /
Fine soot in the smoke” and “I might as well say / I’ve lived beneath
ten chimneys / in total, one moon.”
Andrew Michael Roberts for
something has to happen next:
Andrew Michael Robert’s book
something has to happen next, is full of surprises. Things do happen in these small, imagistic poems.Roberts writes to people, places and objects—and his work gains great energy in these addresses. There is an assumed intimacy with the world (in a poem about the quark, he calls it a “little tramp”). There are moments of hilarity, for example the entirety of the poem, “safe shower,” reads “my cap is / a condom // stretched over my head. // we’re ready / she // in her snorkel / and pink // water-wings,” but also mysterious lyrics and plaintive love poems. These poems often begin in or lean heavily on their titles. This makes the slide of the logic of these slight lyrics even more effectively and delightfully slippery.
Crystal Williams for
Troubled Tongues:
In
Troubled Tongues, Crystal Williams makes abstractions concrete and therefore, somehow both more possible to comprehend and manipulate, as well as more mysterious. Beauty becomes a woman who makes everyone else feel ordinary. Happiness is a girl who “was a little cockeyed & her dress was a peculiar yellow & when she laughed, she sounded, well, something like to a donkey.” In Williams’ poems, phrases such as “God Don’t Like Ugly” and “Crazy as a Road Lizard” become the names of people who are then defined and trapped by those names. In “Telegram,” the retired Gods write home: “Hades retired to Arizona, works part-time at a Krispy Kreme. Stop. / Eurydice wears heavy-duty bras. Stop. / All have wisely avoided Florida / & want you to know they are fine.” In “Race Card,” the poet imagines this idea of “playing the race card” as a literal thing: “Dear Mr. Burke, As you might remember from our conversation, my mom gave me this Race Card (enclosed as per your request) at the beginning of the year because my college said that every freshman needed one. But I never needed mine.” Williams uses the full palette of the emotions in this book— utilizing every color between anger and love and the result is a troubling and moving experience.
Sunday, December 6th is the 42nd Annual Holiday Cheer, A Celebration of Oregon Authors. It takes place from noon to 5:00 p.m. at the Oregon Historical Society
Literary Arts invites you to join Portland public high school students and teachers, WITS writers, the editors of Glimmer Train, Tin House and The Burnside Review, and special guest Oregon Book Award winner Jon Raymond to celebrate the new Writers in the Schools anthology A Whole New Subject. 
Welcome to Paper Fort's Second Annual Oregon Authors Are Thankful posting. You can read last year's post here. 
From our friends at Broadway Books:
Bibi Gaston for The Loveliest Woman in America: A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries, and Her Granddaughter’s Search for Home. You can read an excerpt here.
Debra Gwartney for Live through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love. You can read an excerpt here.
John Kroger for Convictions: A Prosecutor's Battles against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves. You can read an excerpt here.
Floyd Skloot for The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life. You can read an excerpt here.
Miriam Gershow for The Local News. You can read an excerpt of The Local News here. Miriam lives in Eugene, and says her writing schedule "consists of stealing snatches of time" while her baby naps. When asked what inspires her she says, "My aforementioned new infant son. Other people's great writing; Dan Chaon's latest is the most recent to awe me."
Gina Ochsner for The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight. You can read a review in the Observer. Gina lives in Keizer and said in a recent interview, "I only write a few times a week and those times tend to be very short in duration—perhaps an hour or shorter." She went on to say, "Likewise, in doing the mundane, daily tasks of washing dishes, stirring the laundry, fishing for the mate to a lonely sock, I am working out with my hands a snarl with a story. The hands complete what my mind cannot."
Barbara Pope for Cezanne's Quarry. You can read an excerpt here. Barbara lives in Eugene and says "I work in hour spurts during the day-and usually at least one at night-whenever I can. Even if I'm not at the computer, the novel is on my mind and doing some of its own work." Barbara says she "wants to tell stories that will have meaning for my readers."
Jon Raymond for Livability. Jon lives in Portland and says "Ideally, morning is writing time. But with a baby in the house, I've started to reassess evenings, too." When asked what inspires him, he says, "The painters Mike Brophy, Storm Tharp, and Chris Johanson; Neil Young; Sherwood Anderson; Saul Bellow; Dennis Johnson; my friends; my family; poplar trees."
Leslie What for Crazy Love. Leslie lives in Eugene and says, "I get to my work and household chores in the morning and save my alert after 2:00 PM brain for writing. What I secretly suspect is that there's a lot of prep work involved in creative pursuits and that even when I'm folding towels or stirring risotto I'm daydreaming or doing some of the work of writing. The people who inspire me are the quiet heroes, people who are struggle daily to make sense of it all."
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