Kerry Banazek’s 'You, Siphon' Now Available

Lost Roads Press is thrilled to release Kerry Banazek’s You, Siphon as the sixth winner of the Brigham Award for Women Writers. Guest Judges Carolyn Hembree and Joan Kane worked with Lost Roads Editor Susan Scarlata to choose this book. Discussion of the poems in You, Siphon circled around the nuanced relationship Banazek creates between sentences and fragments, the general charge throughout the poems, and the many ways that Banazek’s words move through sound.

Prescient to the current pandemic we’re all living through, poet Brian Blanchfield notes the following about Banazek’s foundational work, “A quiet astonishment suffuses the book: that the body-medically objectified, monitored, mapped, inspected, treated, reported, cased, “casing out”—is the same body that might betray and elicit desire, one which “glitched all yes for you.” Such is “our eachness” in like bodies: such is the “graft economy” of Kerry Banazek’s poetry, appropriate to the sort of experience that discontinues who you were but values anew the distinction of living on…”

In these strange times, we need poetry more than ever and as Carolyn Hembree notes, You, Siphon marks a significant contribution to contemporary literature on illness. As infection swarms, cases of COVID-19 surge, You, Siphon amazingly articulates our current reality to us as we’re all ever more aware that “the beyond and the before are different.”
  
Get your copy of You, Siphon today at spdbooks.org.