Winner of the 2008 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize
Selected by Jean Valentine
In her Foreword to Awayward, National Book Award-winning poet Jean Valentine writes, “Jennifer Kronovet’s poems in Awayward are so surprising and compelling and beautiful, so intelligent and felt. Kronovet uses simple words and works at a mysterious depth, one we can enter with gladness.”
Written while Kronovet was living in Beijing, Awayward illuminates the sense of disconnect that travelers experience when their major touchstones of language and geography are altered. These poems wander the world, drifting in and out of conversations that are alternately comical and grave.
"Nothing strikes me/ as incredibly 'foreign,'" says Kronovet in her whimsical, searching debut, selected by Jean Valentine for BOA's A. Poulin Jr. prize...In every poem, Kronovet searches 'the corners/ of fact' and finds unusual things in plain sight...These free verse lyrics, stacks of narrow couplets, prose poems and poems in two lines are at once endearing and deadly serious."--Publishers Weekly
Sight; Seeing
Inside and outside: the town
built because of a wall
and before the wall.
The weather of having
said everything before
is making us sing.
Instead of pointing,
there is going forward.
Walking in front,
I hold the little built world
between us with two hands
as I try to make a decision
in two languages, the decision
becoming a tourist site.
You’ve seen the pictures.
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978-1-934414-18-7
Paperback
$16.00
Publishing Date: April 2009
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