Synopses & Reviews
Review
The Brittingham Prize in Poetry
Winner of the 1990 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award
Winner of the 1989 Brittingham Prize in Poetry
Synopsis
In Slow Joy, Stefanie Marlis’s first full length collection, the poems move across boundaries, across worlds, difficulties, and happinesses. The book’s persona and concerns—consciousness, suffering , and destruction, love, and death—are not unusual. What is, is that the collection as a whole breaks through pain and sorrowful histories and is finally uplifting, even redemptive, in the sense that prayers are redemptive. And the poems in their serious strength urge the reader to draw a parallel between poetry and the silent prayers monks believe redeem the world. Marlis writes poems that are potentially redemptive, at least for the poet. The poems in Slow Joy are wrought with animate imagery, with story, and with long running lines sprung with falling and rising sounds. Marlis’s poetry translates pain slowly into joy, or as the poet has written, “makes the bearable a gate.”
About the Author
Stefanie Marlis works as a free-lance copywriter and teaches poetry writing at San Francisco State College and the College of Marin. In 1981 she was awarded the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and in 1985 a Creative Achievement Award from the Marin Art Council.