Frequent GMR contributor Alison Prine has won the 2014 CPR Book Award for her manuscript Rearview Mirror.
Several of Alison’s poems have appeared in GMR, including “Fortune Teller” a poem that was featured here in GMR Online recently. Hearty congrats to Alison!
Find out more information by visiting the Award page at the CPR website.
Here are the contest judge, Jeffrey Harrison’s comments:
Two tragic events haunt this powerful first collection—the kind of events that “change the alignment/ of every season after” and tear open vast absences in a life. Alison Prine bravely explores those absences here, engaging in the struggle to make something “immune to ruin” out of what is broken and to mend the connections severed by death, even while acknowledging the inability of language to fill the void left by loved ones or to find easy answers. “This isn’t consolation,” as she says in one poem. Instead, poem by poem, she makes a dwelling for herself and the reader, “building from the inside” while remaining attuned to the possibility of correspondences in the outside world. And through the quiet urgency of her voice, she finds “a secular way of praying.” This book is a blessing.
