Accidental Garden

Accidental Garden, by Catherine Esposito Prescott, was selected by Danusha Laméris for 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