In their citation for the 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry, the jurors of the 2018 prize wrote:
In her brilliant new collection, “The Worrier,” Nancy Takacs has presented her readers with her most finely nuanced and psychologically sophisticated collection of poetry to date. Each piece is an inner dialogue, a meditation, an experiential episode that seems to reveal the true nature of our relationship with our environment fragment by fragment, as we struggle to come to terms with our place in the physical world…
The past year has given us all more to worry about.
As Nancy Takacs explains in this introduction to her installment of our Poets in Pajamas series, she has found rest from these worries in poems about travel.
Takacs has chosen to read a travel poem by Colorado poet Kate Kingston called “Galapagos.” Kingston has published two books of poetry, History of Grey, a runner-up in the Main Street Rag Award, and Shaking the Kaleidoscope, a finalist in the Idaho Prize. Her manuscript, The Future Wears Camouflage, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2022. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Karen Chamberlain Award, the W.D Snodgrass Award for Poetic Endeavor and Excellence, the Ruth Stone Prize, and the Atlanta Review International Publication Prize.
From her own work, Takacs continues “The Worrier” series with this 2020 poem “Gitche Gami”:
Takacs is the recipient of the 2016 Juniper Prize for Poetry, a 2019 Pushcart Prize, and two 15 Bytes Best Book Awards for Poetry. She is currently the poet laureate of Helper City, where she directs the Steamboat Mountain reading series. She is also a member of the Board for the Utah Humanities Council. Though she lives most of the year in Wellington, Utah, she spends summers in the north woods of Wisconsin, walking the woods and beaches near Lake Superior, and living in a small cabin there with her husband, poet Jan Minich.
Running annually during the month of April, Poets in Pajamas invites Utah poets to read from their own work and the work of a poet they admire.
Categories: Literary Arts | Poets in Pajamas
