The Washington Prize panel of judges has selected Derrida’s Cat, by Leslie Adrienne Miller of Minneapolis, MN, to receive the annual award of publication and $1500.
The Washington Prize, founded in 1981, goes each year to an exceptional manuscript by an American poet at any stage of their career.
Of Miller’s collection, Washington Prize Series Editor Nils Michals says, “Derrida’s Cat refers to the famous philosopher’s meditation on shame while in the gaze of another, in his case when he realizes his naked body is being ‘seen’ by his cat, Logos. Miller’s poems wrestle with precisely this disquiet: the moment of realization that one is subject to another’s gaze. In this collection nearly every object, animate and inanimate, becomes so electric with its own presence that the entire buzzing natural world arrives as an equal to the speaker navigating difficult terrain, both inside and out. The lazy deer, wild grapes, even a flattened snake in the road—they all come alive from within on their own terms and operate as a kind of spirited mirror which calls into question whether the speaker’s actions or senses of self even matter.
“But these alternately wry and playful poems, which often ride the blade’s edge between deep care and nonchalance, aren’t afraid of ‘the body’s crude noise of being alive.’ In an era often hyper-fixated on defining a ‘self,’ this is an important book, one that wrestles with identity, shame, and reflection, but perhaps more importantly asks if reconciliation in the winding down of human performance is possible, and whether there exists somewhere a path back to innocence.”
Leslie Adrienne Miller is the author of the poetry collections Y, The Resurrection Trade, and Eat Quite Everything You See from Graywolf Press, and Yesterday Had a Man In It, Ungodliness, and Staying Up For Love from Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Miller’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Harvard Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Kenyon Review. Professor Emerita of English, University of St. Thomas, she holds degrees in creative writing and literature from Stephens College, University of Missouri, Iowa Writers Workshop, and University of Houston. http://lesliemillerpoet.com/
CONGRATULATIONS ALSO TO OUR FINALISTS!
Present Moment in the Life’s Day by Jessica Greenbaum (NY)
Bruise / Theory by Ann Keniston (NV)
Love After Roe by Jennifer LeBlanc (MA)
If We So Choose by Josh Luckenbach (TX)
A Matriarchy by Erica Luckert (MS)
Thunderoot by Laura Rockhold (MN)
Glass Delusion by Kirk Wilson (TX)