~*JENA OSMAN & LAURA MORIARTY WIN 2020 FIRECRACKER AWARD FOR POETRY*~SPD is proud to announce that longtime friends and supporters, Jena Osman and Laura Moriarty, have won the 2020 Firecracker Award for Poetry for their books Motion Studies and Personal Volcano respectively.
The CLMP Firecracker Awards for Independently Published Literature are given annually to celebrate books and magazines that make a significant contribution to our literary culture and the publishers that strive to introduce important voices to readers far and wide.
Of Motion Studies, the Judges wrote: "Jena Osman’s Motion Studies defies categorization, combining science writing, dystopian (science) fiction, popular journalism, critical theory, and lyricism."
Of Personal Volcano, the Judges wrote: "Personal Volcano is a tension between the ‘social’ and the ‘deep ecological’encompassing of something larger and more powerful than the anthropocentric could ever admit."
Motion Studies
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019)
By Jena Osman
"MOTION STUDIES consists of three essay-poems that begin as meditations on 19th century science and end firmly as research into the present. From chronophotography to algorithmic surveillance, from phrenology to fMRI brain scans, from Victorian specimen collections to the bleached bones of the Great Barrier Reef, each poem in this collection explores technologies of knowing each other and the world we're in."
Personal Volcano(Nightboat Books, 2019)By Laura Moriarty"A mesmerizing exploration of the intensity and power of volcanoes in personal, geologic, and spiritual time. PERSONAL VOLCANO explores the history of volcano-related catastrophes worldwide, meditating on ecopoetics and climate catastrophes to come. Volcanoes have caused famines, even extinctionsyet, in the context of geologic time, much like human beings, they take up barely a moment."
Find out more about the Firecracker Awards here.