Kerry Banazek’s You, Siphon wins 2018 Brigham Award

Lost Roads Press is thrilled to have selected Kerry Banazek’s manuscript You, Siphon as the winner of the 2018 Brigham Award for Women Writers. Guest Judges Carolyn Hembree and Joan Kane worked with Lost Roads Editor Susan Scarlata to choose this book among a solid field of applicants. Discussion of the poems in You, Siphon circled around the relationships between sentences and fragments established early in the book, the attention to subject, the general charge present throughout the poems, and the many ways that Banazek’s words move through sound. This passage from You, Siphon provides an enticing snippet of the book to come.

                                                                from The Book of Things :: The secret of

                 life is not to remain the same. The same. The same. The same. The

                 secret of life is that you rustle. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh

                 hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

                 hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh The ratio values are calculated using the original results

                 (including two decimal places). You don’t have to decide now, but we will

                 not be here forever.
                                                       The world gets bored with itself.

                
                 It feels lucky to be alive.

                 Stridently. Quietly landscapes, carved out of books. In what the old

                 timers call blackberry winter. 

                                              
                                                        Despite the sense that absence is my own.
                   A supersensible object. Architecture. Arterial archeaology.

We all have
our grievances.

Many of us can relate, hopefully, to still rustling despite “having our grievances,” and, at times, “getting bored with the world.” Still we rustle. You, Siphon will be available in the winter of 2020 as the sixth winner of the Besmilr Brigham Award for Women Writers. Runners up for this prize include: Hemmed Remnant by Nawal Nader-French, My Tennessee by Cynthia Roth, and Probable Garden by Bronwen Tate. Established in 2012, this award commemorates the work of Besmilr Brigham and publishes work by female-identified poets who live away from publishing centers.