Description
Accidental Garden, by Catherine Esposito Prescott, was selected by Danusha Laméris as the winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize.
I admire these poems for their willingness to encounter; to give us the saw-toothed shark, the microbe, the manatee, and, of course, the moon. Here is a poet who holds, so dearly, all that slips away. “O heart,” begins one address, “crumb-lover, taker of any bid. For as long / as there’s land to walk along, isthmus, / channel, bridge to nothing, I’ll move, I’ll play, / I’ll scrape flint into fire.”
—Danusha Laméris, final judge, Barry Spacks Poetry Prize
More praise for Accidental Garden:
In Accidental Garden, Catherine Esposito Prescott assembles a glowing collection of poems that seam the quotidian with the ethereal; for this poet, they are one and the same. There is a gently probing curiosity to these poems, a faith pieced with wing, hedge, moon, and the tenderness of our own bodies. The poet writes: “I am a woman with a voice…that rains light.” That’s what these poems do above all—they shine.
—Emma Trelles, author of Tropicalia and Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara
In poems both elegiac and celebratory, Prescott uses the lyric form to simultaneously center and expand her (and our) human experience. Accidental Garden takes on a global pandemic and individual illness and emerges as a handbook for survival. These poems are intimate and vulnerable but also utterly fierce and hauntingly beautiful. In each poem, I felt in the hands of a master.
—Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and Works & Days
Catherine Esposito Prescott is the winner of the 2022 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize, selected by Danusha Laméris for her book Accidental Garden. Prescott is the author of the chapbooks Maria Sings and The Living Ruin. Her work appears in many journals and anthologies, including EcoTheo Review, Green Mountains Review Online,MER VOX, Mezzo Cammin, NELLE, Northwest Review, Pleiades, Spillway, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, andWest Trestle Review as well as Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment, & Healing and The Orison Anthology. Co-founder of SWWIM and Editor in Chief of SWWIM Every Day, Prescott earned an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from NYU. She leads writing and yoga retreats and teaches vinyasa yoga and yoga philosophy in Miami, where she lives with her family. She has a website at http://catherineespositoprescott.com.
