Amnesia

Readers who have followed Jonah Winter's work in the pages of Field and other magazines, and who know his delightful first collection, MAINE, will welcome this lively and inventive volume. Winter's admirers, who include poets like Charles Simic, Charles Wright, and David Lehman (who selected MAINE for Slope Editions and wrote the introduction), emphasize his assimilation of the Surrealist tradition to an American landscape and a contemporary culture that become dreamlike, surprising, poignant, and hilarious in his capable hands. Objects and events we might never have thought capable of poetic treatment acquire grace, beauty, and even a certain immortality in this book. It becomes a stay against amnesia that constitutes an enterprise both comic and heroic. Selected from over 500 manuscript entries, this is the seventh winner of our annual contest. The next prize entrants are invited to submit in May 2004, and the prize winner will be announced by August.