Description
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. 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.
"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."—Jay Snodgrass
"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."—Cole Swensen
Author Bio
Of Colombian and Puerto Rican descent, Sandy Florian was born in New York and raised in Latin America. She is the author of six books of hybrid prose: TELESCOPE (Action Books, 2006), 32 Pedals & 47 Stops (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007), THE TREE OF NO (Action Books, 2008), PRELUDE TO AIR FROM WATER (Elixir Press, 2010), ON WONDERLAND & WASTE (Sidebrow Press, 2010), and BOXING THE COMPASS (Noemi Press, 2013). She has been awarded a residency at Caldera Arts and a writer's grant supported residency at the Vermont Studio Center, as well as literary prizes from Elixir Press, New Voices, and Brown University. She lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Nonwestern Literature and Creative Writing at West Virginia University. She also serves as one of the "other" editors for Tarpaulin Sky Journal.
Author City: MORGANTOWN, WV USA