Tulips, Water, Ash (Morse Poetry Prize)

Tulips, Water, Ash begins with a kind of invocation--a calling-out from the domestic world, the soft / chewy center of here: the mailbox, / the toaster, the dentist office . . . Whiteboard, whiteout. Little yellow / notes everywhere like moths. So many of these poems--their bus stops and taquerias, sidewalks and bathroom mirrors--give us the ordinary, the daily, but with all the lights turned on: surfaces made near-transparent by a consciousness whose shifts and asides are a pleasure to inhabit. Others dive into the mystery just underneath, colliding junior high school with theoretical cosmology, suburbia with multiple universes. There is a fascination, too, with the life of language, the names of things in these poems often as much a mystery as their simple presence. This is daily life with its underlying passions and strangeness exposed--the point at which each of us, like the speaker, slip s] back down / through a hole in the net.

Winner of the 2009 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize