Flower Conroy has won the 2024 Richard Mathews Prize for Poetry for the collection, Zoodikers: A Bestiary. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and paperback book publication in 2025 by the University of Tampa Press.
LGBTQIA+ artist, former Key West Poet Laureate, and NEA and MacDowell Fellow, Flower Conroy is the author of “Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder” (NFSPS’s Barbara Stevens’ contest winner), “A Sentimental Hairpin,” “Greenest Grass” (Lynx’s House Press’ Blue Lynx Prize winner), and the forthcoming “And Scuttle My Balloon,” co-authored with Donna Spruijt-Metz.
Conroy has led workshops at/for The Studios of Key West, La Romita School of Art, Write Here, Write Now, and others. In addition to care-giving and free-lancing editing, Conroy is working on a series of Ephemeral Altars—impermanent assemblage art pieces that visually evoke and celebrate poetry collections (which can be found on social media).
Conroy describes the collection:
To understand anything—or to attempt to—is to discover distinctions and similarities conflux, flip, muddle, resist, meld, blur, reflect; boundaries are plastic if not arbitrary, the world and its inhabitants are fragile, everything is interconnected—“Zoodikers: A Bestiary” is my attempt to write through and towards this. Part personal inventory, part existential dread mediation, part hope anthem, I wanted this collection of prose-poems to more wildly explore the abstractions and examine the realities bedeviling me. Midlife. The body. Sickness. Extinction. Sex. Sexuality. Age difference in a relationship. In a queer relationship. Juxtaposition and contradiction. Confession and confrontation. Life, birth and childlessness. Death, the future, the past, AI. What is human and what is animal. How do we account for that which we don’t account for, what do we compromise when we compromise? How we hurt one another. How we heal.
Tampa Review judges praise Conroy’s collection, stating:
Zoodikers, its title from an obsolete 18th-Century interjection of surprise, makes Flower Conroy’s case for revival not just of the word itself, but for the art of the bestiary, the book here in a dazzling revisionist form of a bestiary itself, being of animal, cryptid, and spirits good, evil, indifferent and sometimes other. In “Echidna”, the speaker, in describing the pins of acupuncture, imagines themselves as the echidna, the spiked anteater, “filiform splinter embedded in the meridian of my soft spot, crown of the governing vessel”, that space between the “mind’s long lists of past due & to do & will it so” and the bestiary induction of the creature behind poetry, that sublime “axis of a planet yet discovered, blood temples”.
Elsewhere, Zoodikers makes a Moore-esque case for the extinct dodo and the quagga, their histories, and, via the true resurrectionist possibilities of our shared art, makes another case for all the same potentialities of our nature and the “lavender & melody” we still have, this acknowledged by Conroy as being continuously undercut by the same-such us. Our meadows and habitats, and the creatures within them, even exist electric in cyberspace, and are shown to us in Conroy’s “Ibex”, where Conroy says “it was written: When Thriving Ibex enters the battlefield you get ⚡ ⚡ (two energy counters) but I misread it as encounters”, Conroy’s bestiary existing in time, place, and no-place, wanting a communion across them all.
Answers are sought for the pursuit of that: from Ouija boards and James Merrill, from the horseshoe crab, from the “real biological weirdo” the tardigrade, while, all throughout, unsolicited answers come from the Bigfoot threat of the patriarchy, interpellations of the Virgin Mary, and the zoodiker itself of the night-time incubus. Long-gone animals obscure themselves, and fossil records take their circuits in the dark in “Lazarus Taxa”, while their fossil collectors like Mary Anning dip in and out of the account, all while lovers name animals after other lovers at zoos, and the speaker reinvents the ars poetica in “Parroting”, the life, which is poetic for us all, interjecting likewise as the much-beloved elephant gets traced from Dali to the riding of one singular elephant at a small-town carnival.
Zoodikers is a major book, in the middle of itself and our world. The empathy, the humanity, and the inventiveness find their spaces in Conroy’s remarkable compendium of life, their bestiary as equally comfortable in being grimoire, taxonomy, and encyclopaedia. It’s a startling achievement, bringing us to our own interjection of surprise, and up there with the best books I’ve read in years.
The Richard Mathews Prize for Poetry (formerly the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry) is given annually for a previously unpublished booklength manuscript. Judging is by the editors of Tampa Review. Submissions are now being accepted for 2025.
