{"id":54782,"date":"2020-09-19T08:58:40","date_gmt":"2020-09-19T14:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=54782"},"modified":"2020-09-21T11:44:05","modified_gmt":"2020-09-21T17:44:05","slug":"michael-lavers-shanan-ballam-katharine-coles-finalists-for-the-15-bytes-book-award-in-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/michael-lavers-shanan-ballam-katharine-coles-finalists-for-the-15-bytes-book-award-in-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Lavers, Shanan Ballam, Katharine Coles: Finalists for the 15 Bytes Book Award in Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Michael Lavers, After Earth<\/em>, University of Tampa Press<\/strong><\/p>\n

If much of contemporary poetry is like a museum full of Rothko paintings, then Michael Lavers is walking in and hanging up a Renaissance painting. If it\u2019s like an aviary, then Lavers\u2019 book\u00a0After Earth<\/i>\u00a0is more like a woodpecker across the street tapping iambics into tree trunks. He works in sonnets and blank verse, end rhyme and internal rhyme, alliteration and allusion, drawing on Shakespeare and the Bible and Greek mythology as much as the cold landscapes of Canada and the American Midwest. In his long poem \u201cWorks and Days\u201d \u2014 the book\u2019s fifth and final section \u2014 the speaker says, \u201cLet\u2019s not wrong Earth \/ a second time by bungling the elegy.\u201d Lavers doesn\u2019t, there\u2019s no bungling here. Here there is formal control you don\u2019t run into often, and it isn\u2019t all elegiac sorrow either. In one poem, he says about life, \u201cIf the next is better, I\u2019ll still miss this world.\u201d In another, he\u2019s celebratory and funny, writing, \u201cThe grapes don\u2019t wonder what light is; \/ the light just lights them, and the grapes grape back.\u201d After Earth<\/i>\u00a0is finely crafted, musical, and when you read it, the poems poem back.<\/p>\n

Michael Lavers received his MFA from John Hopkins University and his PhD from the University of Utah.He is the winner of the 2016 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize. He currently teaches poetry at Brigham Young University.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Shanan Ballam, Inside the Animal: The Collected Red Riding Hood Poems<\/em>, Main Street Rag\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

What kind of mother sends her little girl into the forest with a basket of goodies?\u00a0 In Shanan Ballam’s\u00a0Inside the Animal<\/em>, she is not the stern moralist of the original tales, but someone more dark, even treacherous, sending her daughter “meek, into darkness, twisting.” Roles, motives and personal histories shift and slide in Ballam’s reimagining of the classic fairy tale. Divided into six sections, Inside the Animal<\/em> circles the original narrative, looking inside and outside the story, fleshing out characters full of longings and dark histories. Wolf is his own, very human character, equally trapped by his personal desires and the gnawing confines of others’ imposed narratives. Grandmother’s rich life is both flush with the the physical world and tinged by remorse. Red Riding Hood is no simple naif, but a complex, growing woman who rejects her role as victim in one poem, while in another says, “I’ll wait \/ like a tender nectarine, wait for someone to sink \/ teeth into me.”\u00a0 With language vivid, and very physical, Balam turns morality tales into mortality tales. Inside the Animal<\/em> is a collection for children who have become adults.<\/p>\n

Shanan Ballam earned her MFA in Poetry\u00a0Writing from the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and is currently a\u00a0Senior Lecturer\u00a0for the Utah State University English Department where she\u00a0teaches poetry writing and composition. She is also the\u00a0Internship Coordinator and the Poetry Faculty Advisor for\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Sink Hollow: An Undergraduate Literary Magazine<\/span>. She lives in Logan, Utah, where is the city’s Poet Laureate.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Katharine Coles, Wayward<\/em>, Red Hen Press<\/strong><\/p>\n

Coles’ exquisite minimalist poetry never has a single word out of place. The Notes give a sense of how she absorbs the world into found poetry. She often uses erasures, and subtle wordplay. For instance, the poem \u201cAugust\u201d\u00a0\u00a0begins\u00a0\u00a0\u201cIt is the east, and Juliet<\/i>.\u201d She erases Shakespeare and trusts the reader to fill it in. Coles’ poems flit between the physical (as in scientific) world, and a kind of magical realism that stems from a collaboration with the artist Maureen O\u2019Hara Ure. These magical elements add a good-humored mysticism, acknowledged by recurring\u00a0\u00a0erasures all titled with the infinity symbol. As Tom Sleigh\u2019s\u00a0\u00a0blurb puts it, \u201c. . . virtuosity coupled with psychological insight can get you closer to the heart of things in ten lines than in a pages-long narrative.\u201d That\u2019s an accurate description of Coles\u2019 art.<\/p>\n

Poet, novelist, and editor Katharine Coles earned a BA at the University of Washington, an MA at the University of Houston, and a PhD at the University of Utah.\u00a0At the University of Utah, Coles has directed the Creative Writing Program; co-directed the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature, with mathematician and biologist Fred Alder; and served as series editor for the University of Utah Press\u2019s Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Book Award. She lives in Salt Lake City.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Lavers, After Earth, University of Tampa Press If much of contemporary poetry is like a museum full of Rothko paintings, then Michael Lavers is walking in and hanging up a Renaissance painting. If it\u2019s like an aviary, then Lavers\u2019 book\u00a0After Earth\u00a0is more like a woodpecker across the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":54817,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3230,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-awards","category-literary-arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/poetry_awards.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-15 02:10:20","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54782"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54816,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54782\/revisions\/54816"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}