WINNER OF THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES

 Donna Stonecipher’s mesmerizing The Cosmopolitan is a travelogue of consciousness, a diary of displacement whose writing self seems simultaneously nowhere and everywhere (“And isn’t nowhere, after all, also an elsewhere?”). As the voice’s location shifts from metropolis to metropolis, from country to country, never settling in one place long enough to be identified with it, it becomes intertwined with the voices of other writers in a dazzling fugue that draws the reader irresistibly in. —John Koethe

Donna Stonecipher has opened up the prose poem so that it is no longer a box in which one pours their little story. In place of the false securities offered by narrative, she explores the “spectacularly faceted chit” of being alive, of being displaced and drifting, of being lost and found among the many languages, stories, cries for help and love that anyone of us encounters.  Her writing is full of tenderness, sympathy, and acute observation. Reading her “Inlays” is akin to following a bird in flight; they move at different speeds, dive, rise, roll, swoop, and float, and are always something to behold. She deserves far greater recognition than this award. —John Yau