Rare Space by Leslie Anne Mcilroy of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is the winner of the 2001 Word Press Poetry Prize.
Ms. Mcilroy has already been recognized as one of the most promising poets of her generation with her inclusion in Carnegie-Mellon University Press's definitive anthology American Poetry: The Next Generation. The publication of Rare Space, her first full-length collection, confirms this promise. Ms. Mcilroy's poetry is a triumph of wit and skill. She writes a hard, edgy free-verse line, but the tautness of her language is softened by the compassion of human relationship--family, lovers, friends. As the poem "Gravel" concludes:
Who else, I wonder,
could know all this,
place a finger on the heart
without flinching
from the very beat
of the thing?
As the poet Billy Collins has noted, "Using a hard diction and sawed-off lines, Leslie Anne Mcilroy explores a smoky after-hours drama of longing and failure, lust and courage. Her tough style is almost successful at hiding the love that drives these strong poems."
Praise for Rare Space |
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| Rare Space is winning raves from readers and critics. | |
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette |
Main Street Rag |
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"Mcilroy's first full-length collection demonstrates a strong
original voice, a sense of the music of language, and a resilient social conscience that often hits its mark." |
"This is a strong collection of poems that doesn't tiptoe around the interactions and often-dysfunctional relationships between the narrator and those around her. But beneath the toughness is a love of people and place that transcends the dark sides of those relationships with a 'cups-half-full' optimism." |
Leslie Anne Mcilroy is an assistant editor for Creative Nonfiction. She is also Managing Editor and cofounder of HEArt--Human Equity Through Art--a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit organization publishing the nation's only journal of literature and art devoted to confronting discrimination and promoting social justice. Her awards include the Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Competition for her chapbook Gravel and first place in the 1997 Chicago Literary Awards Competition judged by Gerald Stern.
$15.00, 98 pages, ISBN 0-9708667-0-4
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