Poetry. Nightboat Poetry Prize Winner 2010, selected by Franz Wright. Paula Cisewski guides us through a landscape that resonates with the fugitive and far-gone, the ghosts of what Whitman calls our "go-befores." A brother vanishes, and gives rise to a second city of the mind, in which "the dead and the missing" remain citizens, in which Keats's negative capability is the sheriff in town. Cisewski constructs a swaggering, tender, Carneyesque Fargo of the mind ("Do we love Heaven more than God?"), a place that relentlessly arrests and releases our loved ones. This is a book of poems that fares forever forward, quixotic, in the fullest sense of the word: picaresque, curious, errant, and hilarious. In a midwestern odyssey at once metaphysical and emphatically real, Cisewski confronts (as Nancy Cunard once wrote) "every windmill in a landscape of windmills."

Author City: Minneapolis, MN USA

Paula Cisewski is the author of GHOST FARGO (Nightboat Books, 2010), UPON ARRIVAL (Black Ocean, 2006), and the chapbook How Birds Work (Fuori Editions, 2002). She lives in Minneapolis where she teaches writing and humanities classes and hosts the Imaginary Press Reading Series. It's pronounced "shi-ZEHv-ski."

Reviews and Other Links
http://paulacisewski.blogspot.com/
Jordan Davis in The Constant Critic