Elgin Award Winners and Book Soundtracks
- At September 10, 2014
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
0
Hey, a little good news that I had to post – Unexplained Fevers won second place in this year’s Elgin Awards for full-length poetry books! Here’s a list of all the Elgin Award Winners: http://sfpoetry.com/el/14elgin.html
Thanks to all the Sci-Fi Poetry Association members who voted! (And for those of you who didn’t know, yes, there is such a thing as a sci-fi poetry association!)
And, thanks to Sharon Suzuki-Martinez for featuring me on her Poet’s Playlist Tumblr. This playlist is for The Robot Scientist’s Daughter…upcoming in 2015 from Mayapple Press. Check it out to find out my weird (and admittedly schizophrenic) listening preferences while I was writing the book!
Update: Thanks to Lesley Wheeler for her discussion on her blog of what was cut from her Eliot-Waste Land essay in this month’s Poetry Magazine, where she discusses poems by Daisy Fried and my own persona-poem-as-Vivienne-Eliot, “Her Nerves,” from Becoming the Villainess. In fact, there are a ton of Eliot-inspired poems in the book, as I started investigating Philomel, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, because of “The Waste Land,” as well as the theory of the abject, Baudelaire, and Swinburne. Here’s the poem in its entirety:
Her Nerves
“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad.” – T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
I surrounded myself with the safe, with the sane.
“You know there’s a history of mental illness in my family.”
I devoted myself to botany, to mazes, to the infinitesimal.
I married you to challenge my inevitable end –
my human tranquilizer.
You like my “little poems” but
I scare you when I rock myself over and over
saying I dreamed I killed you again,
I dreamed you killed me again,
and you couldn’t stop the nightmares.
You liked it when I laughed at Plath,
sketched repeating uneven branches of starfish arms.
You are afraid–not just of me,
but what I see and hear that you don’t –
the crusts of blood, slippery dirt-gorged voices.
You like it when I curse creatively,
hate it when paper piles like excrement around me.
Afraid our sloppy physicality
will tear at your maintained monastic cubes,
our “Siren Song,” our red hair flaming into points.
You name our extremities as if decayed already,
the translucent hand,
the ankle frail as a twig.
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
