Water Between Us (Pitt Poetry Series) (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of Water Between Us (Pitt Poetry Series) Friday, July 31 2009.

• 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize winner. Shara McCallum is the eighteenth winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, one of the nation's most prestigious awards for a first book of poetry. The Water Between Us is a poetic examination of cultural fragmentation, and the exile's struggle to reconcile the disparate and often conflicting influences of the homeland and the adopted country. The book also centers on other kinds of physical and emotional distances: those between mothers and daughters, those created by being of mixed racial descent, and those between colonizers and the colonized. Despite these distances, or perhaps because of them, the poems affirm the need for a multilayered and cohesive sense of self. McCallum's language is precise and graceful. Drawing from Anancy tales, Greek myth, and biblical stories, the poems deftly alternate between American English and Jamaican patois, and between images both familiar and surreal. Starrett Poetry Prize winners are published as part of the Pitt Poetry Series, which was founded in 1968 by the University of Pittsburgh Press to publish the best in contemporary American poetry. Since 1978 Ed Ochester has edited the series, and he serves as final judge of the Starrett competition. In 1990 American Bookseller pronounced the Pitt Poetry Series the first among five "outstanding" university press series in the field of poetry.

Shelfari edited the contributors of Water Between Us (Pitt Poetry Series) Saturday, July 25 2009.

• Added a contributor: Shara McCallum: (Primary Author)