Hometown for an Hour

In this collection of poems, winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Jennifer Rose writes primarily of places and displacement. Using the postcard's conventions of brevity, immediacy, and, in some instances, humor, these poems are greetings from destinations as disparate as Cape Cod, Kentuckiana, and Croatia. Rich in imagery, deftly crafted, and imbued with a lightness of voice these poems are also postmarked from poetry's more familiar provinces of love, nature and loss. Chosen from hundreds of submissions, Hometown for an Hour, is the winner of the ninth Summers Poetry Prize. As final judge David Yezzi wrote: "Jennifer Rose's "postcards" arrive with news of a world receding-but for her evocative communiques" rapidly into the past. The poems serve to fix in time her transient locals, revealing not remote tourist destinations but the very places where the poet has been most alive. Rose's odd assortment of places, she tells us, have seduced her, just as reading her poems, with their elegant and muscular formal excellence, will most certainly seduce readers. Tempering nostalgia with wit and emotional immediacy with consummate musicianship and craft, these poems reconstruct a world that, in Rose's fine imagining of it, becomes not only hers but ours as well." Poet and city planner Jennifer Rose has been a "Discovery"/ The Nation winner and the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Society of America, among others. Her previous collection, The Old Direction of Heaven, was published in 2000. She lives in Waltham, Massachusetts.