11th Annual Juried Reading Second Place Winner

Sharon Kubasak of North Olmsted, Ohio

Jorie Graham says:
"Quirky, plain-spoken, ("plain door,/this weightless rectangular dream") these poems know exactly how to pace their overlit Hopper-like assertions--stark, blunt, odd, annunciatory. The diction is gorgeous ("mystical props are the incompleteness you crave"). They remind one of both our Chinese precursors, and the Zen utterances of some of the later haiku masters. My favorite line/image:

window in/window out only the observer is curious

Brilliant! Every poem is a true original."

BIO:
Sharon Kubasak's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of magazines, including Field, Verse, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine and a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University. She is currently completing a poetry manuscript and revising a prose work, Alone with the Lyric: Descriptions Toward a Poetics of Solitude. She teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at Baldwin-Wallace College where she is an assistant professor.

The Grotto of Tilting Pandemonium

Li Po's boat the paper is a phenomenon.
Steam rises, or first frost, the weather is non-negotiable.
Fretwork of stone, the Sirens have been here.
The ideograms would be turquoise at the equator.
Let us move beyond the plum tree, a nest is defying the wind.
Mobile of orange fruit, graffiti of circumvention.
An epic, a girl, a water globe, no anchor.
She could be centuries old.
Passports are not waterproof.
Diorama: girl in a boat as seen only with a flashlight.
Blue moon so atypical of the infrastructure.
To shake the globe or not, to rattle.
Echo of a snowflake shimmied between the rocks.
Window in, window out.
Only the observer is curious.

© 2005 The Poetry Center of Chicago
All Rights Revert Back to the Author Upon Publication.
No Portion of this poem may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.