books

Flower Conroy Wins 2024 Richard Mathews Prize for Poetry

Flower Conroy

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.

Scott Frey wins 2023 Tampa Review Poetry Prize

Image of a man with folded arms smiling into the camera.
Poet Scott Frey

Scott Frey has won the 2023 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for his collection, Heavy Metal Nursing. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and paperback book publication in 2024 by the University of Tampa Press. 

 Scott Frey grew up in Western Pennsylvania and teaches English at Pine Meadow Academy. He learned to teach and found his first writing community at The Landmark School. He then found a wonderful writers’ community during his years teaching at The Ethel Walker School. He also served as a parent advisor for the Pediatric Advanced Care Team at Children’s Hospital, Boston. He and his wife run a non-profit charity, The Charlotte Frey Foundation, whose mission is to help children with multiple handicaps and life-threatening illnesses improve their quality of life.

Among other publications, he has work forthcoming in Passages North, december magazine, One, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Missouri Review, where he was awarded the 2023 Perkoff Prize for poetry. His prose chapbook, Night Nurses, was a winner in the 2023 Black River Chapbook Competition. He and his family live in Granby, Connecticut.

Tampa Review judges praised Frey’s collection, stating:

“Heavy Metal Nursing tells a story of love, the poet Scott Frey’s love for his firstborn daughter. It is not a sentimental love but a “heavy-metal” one, complicated by the hard facts of his daughter’s life: she was born with a severe brain injury, needed intensive care her entire life, and died at three years old. This book is the work of a poet and a parent in equal measure. These are poems of vulnerability and pain, of course, but simultaneously of parenting, caregiving, marriage, medicine, humor, tenderness, affection. Frey brings poetic technique to bear on personal trauma, narrative on desolation, love on loss.”

Frey says, “This collection is an attempt to depict the mix of sorrow and wonder we lived with our daughter during her traumatic birth and medically complex life. Even when our days felt like long tunnels, we were surprised by the care and kindness of our communities. This helped shape our responses to her absence and our responses to the ways her presence continues in a way unknowable beforehand.

Many of the poems began as a method of reaching towards the nurses, doctors, therapists, friends, and family who offered to our daughter and to us such exquisite attention and dedication.

The struggle to craft these narrative lines gave me a way to distill the chaos and emotions roiling within many of our most haunting scenes and memories. It gave me a form for placing lines of grit and despair arm-to-arm with lines of laughter and joy.”

This year the judges also announced two finalists:

Bruised Light: Collected Father by John Pijewski

Miss La La and the Cirque Fernando by Gavin Moses

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 2024.

Test Your Literary Toughness

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Reading Flavorwire’s “50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers” challenged my literary fortitude. I found myself wanting to buy a bunch of new books, then take kickboxing lessons, hit the gym, or maybe dive of a cliff.

I applaud the effort to compile a list of fifty tough books. Even putting this list together required its own toughness and determination. I would have agonized over leaving off Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and struggled with including Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior. It’s a great collection, but tough or extreme? I don’t see it.

The guidelines for this list were clear. The books included some that were “absurdly long, some notoriously difficult, some with intense or upsetting subject matter but blindingly brilliant prose, some packed into formations that require extra effort or mind expansion, and some that fit into none of those categories, but are definitely for tough girls (or guys) only.”

Here are a few highlights from the list.

  1. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
  2. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
  3. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
  4. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
  5. JR by William Gaddis
  6. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
  7. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  8. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill
  9. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
  10. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
  11. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
  12. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
  13. Pet Sematary by Stephen King
  14. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
  15. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
  16. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  17. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
  18. Tampa by Alissa Nutting
  19. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
  20. The Tunnel by William Gass

Check the Flavorwire post for the complete list and reasons for each novel’s inclusion.

 

All the Cool Kids Read Banned Books

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Yesterday marked the first day of banned books week this year, and there is much to celebrate. According to the event’s webpage, the week is an annual celebration of intellectual freedom from censorship that was kicked off in 1982 in response to mounting censorship of literature in schools. Since its inception, “[m]ore than 11,300 books have been challenged,” the website states.

One would hope the trend of banned books would have faded over the past few decades, but in the past month alone both Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man and Cuban-American Cristina García’s 1992 Dreaming in Cuban have been banned from high schools for their content.

Ellison’s Invisible Man, which tackled twentieth century racial prejudice and beat out Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and Steinbeck’s East of Eden for the National Book Award, has been banned from school libraries in Randolph County, North Carolina. One school board member reportedly said the book had no “literary value.” Invisible Man has already been banned in the past from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Washington state schools.

García’s Dreaming in Cuban, which follows the multi-generational lineage of women in a family in revolutionary Cuba, has been banned from classrooms in Sierra Vista, Arizona.  The novel has been referred to as “porn” and “child pornography” by those opposing the book’s inclusion in school curriculum. Dreaming in Cuban was also a finalist for the National Book Award.

I’d like to believe there are no racial implications in the banning of these books, but at least in Arizona’s case, the state doesn’t have a very flattering history of racist school curriculum. But that doesn’t make the banning any less ridiculous and, ultimately, meaningless.

Public school officials need to realize the danger they place themselves in when they support censorship in the era of free information and the internet. They’re fighting an embarrassingly losing battle against the exchange of ideas in America, showing how dispensable the censored curriculum they offer really is.

Here’s my advice to parents and students.

Read as many banned books as you can. Don’t just read banned books during this week, make a lifelong habit of gorging yourself on all kinds of literature with brutal and voracious hunger. Be especially curious of banned literature, because censorship throughout history has been reserved for the most frighteningly powerful words. According to the banned books week webpage, Ellison and García find themselves among some staggeringly brilliant names and titles, including Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Jack London’s The Call of the Wild; Joseph Heller’s Catch-22; Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire; Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; Allen Ginsburg’s Howl; and, laughably, even Ray Bradbury’s literary censorship novel, Fahrenheit 451.

Take a weekly family drive to your city’s public library, or visit mom and pop bookstores–both desperately need you to walk through their doors as often as possible. If you can’t find what you’re looking for there, consider finding free e-book versions of classic literature at the Project Gutenberg website. In fact, throw them a few dollars in donation. The page offers over 42,000 books in the public domain and many more via affiliate sites.

Trade books with your friends and family, and buy them as gifts.

My advice to school officials is this. Don’t allow your libraries, your school curriculum, to become expendable. Don’t make a mockery of learning. Don’t speak in ignorance about books that added incalculably more to the public conversation when they were published than you could ever take away by removing them from your shelves. Help the kids in your schools become mature adults by giving them the benefit of the doubt; trust them, and guide them through the mature ideas that make these works so integral to our society. Make them care and keep them in the classroom, because the more books you ban, the harder your communities will push to make sure that instead of smoking, the cool kids are reading banned books in the bathroom.