The Red Bird

Winner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize, selected by Allen Grossman. With the persistent, dappled vision of an ecstatic pragmatist, Joyelle McSweeney sees things as they are through "the modern knothole": "Up on the hill,/ a white tent had just got unsteadily to its feet/ like a foal or a just-foaled cathedral." Eventuality, as it is delicately shaded by the fine and fearless intelligence of these kinesthetic arrangements, coincides with imaginative possibility; the resulting poems are as much mind as place; much galaxy as time-inevitable and correct as only true whimsy can be. "The Red Bird is a shockingly good debut collection...McSweeney's poems are exuberant, lyrical, and unapologetically disjunctive. She finds joy in dense agglomerations of sounds and images"--MaisonNeuve. Born in Boston and raised (mostly) in the Philly suburbs, Joyelle McSweeney attended Harvard and Oxford before receiving her MFA from Iowa.

Winner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize, selected by Allen Grossman.