Poetry. Fiction. Cross-Genre. PRELUDE TO AIR AND WATER by Sandy Florian is the winner of the editor's prize in the Tenth Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards. It is an extraordinary collection of prose poetry that transcends both poetry and prose. Jay Snodgrass has this to say: "In PRELUDE TO AIR AND WATER, Sandy Florian deftly manipulates the countries between the prose poem and the experimental lyric. Better to call this a novel in verse where the trajectory of the prose poem is punctuated with experiments in language. The literary descendant of Gertrude Stein and Baudelaire, Florian plays a bluntly meaningful and still elusive music. PRELUDE TO AIR AND WATER is a symphony in declaratives where the abstraction of a 'Moment' appears as a character and sets up poetic associations that are playful and sublime." Cole Swenson says "In a careful choreography of repeatedly missed 'moments,' the familiar characters of Florian's latest collection weave in and out of each other's lives sheathed in a postmodern isolation that keeps actual contact at bay. In them, we see ourselves, misreading, misinterpreting, or just plain missing all the signs--but not without humor, and a tenderness that makes them fully human. A primer for 21st-century relations."

Author Hometown: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA



About the author: Sandy Florian is the author of PRELUDE TO AIR FROM WATER (Elixir Press, 2010), ON WONDERLAND & WASTE (Sidebrow Press, 2010), THE TREE OF NO (Action Books, 2009), 32 Pedals & 47 Stops (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007), and TELESCOPE (Action Books, 2006). She lives in San Francisco and is an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.