- Graywolf Press
- ‘GRATS! To Mary Szybist.
With the internet much too focused on one particularly irrelevant quaint awards ceremony that transpired this week, why not turn our attention to a better another one, the 2015 PEN Literary Awards! The Awards won’t be announced until June after an onerous long list -> short list -> finalist process (AUUUUGHHHHH SNOOZE), but! Yesterday, when PEN American Center announced who’d be judging this year’s awards, there was a familiar Portland face on the list! MARY SZYBIST!
Poet Mary Szybist will be judging for this year’s PEN/Joyce Ostweil Award for Poetry, which goes to “an emerging American poet showing promise of further literary achievement,” along with Craig Morgan Teicher and resplendent goddess of poetry Marie Howe. O TO BE A FLY ON THAT WALL.
Our own Katie Pelletier wrote a forthcoming profile of Szybist. From her discussion of Szybist’s work:
Szybist, who teaches at Lewis and Clark College, writes poems that explore the sacred and the commonplace, and the often-thin border between. Her exquisite lines stick in the mind like any catchy refrain. Examples abound from her latest, the National Book Award-winning collection, Incarnadine, in which Szybist explores the biblical story of the Annunciation. She deploys a variety of forms, using signs, stories, and images from contemporary culture as well as biblical times. Take “Annunciation in Nabokov and Starr,” which incorporates language from Kenneth Starr’s 1998 report on the Clinton White House with Nabokov’s Lolita, creating an uncomfortable encounter between the speaker and the young Virgin Mary. “There was something soft and moist about her, a dare, a rage, an intolerable tenderness,” writes Szybist. We also see the calculated and evocative slippage between Mary the virgin, Mary the icon, and Mary the poet: “Mary always thinks that as soon as she gets a few more things done and finishes the dishes, she will open herself to God.”
Szybist is also National Book Award winner, for her 2013 collection, Incarnadine, from Graywolf Press. Much of her work can be found here.