Drinking with O’Hara

Winner of the 2019 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize is Drinking with O’Hara, by Glenn Freeman.

It’s a hard thing, not knowing, and learning about the death and despair of those who were once close, once known, becoming a “caesura /in the shortened line /a breath /in the midst of /the ongoing world.” Here, subtle formal aspects catch us by surprise, elegiac lines situate us in and outside of time as these poems move easily from narrative to lyric meditations.

—Curtis Bauer, author of American Selfie

What amazing powers of attention to the natural world and human interaction alike, an attention that keeps on digging “to where the rhythm runs true.” In repetition and variation, in free and fixed forms, Freeman reminds us of the capacity of art to remain in dialog—with self, with others—to sustain intimacy and connection, especially in the most isolating moments.

—Mira Rosenthal, author of The Local World