Karen Green's Bough Down Wins Believer Book Prize

Congratulations to Karen Green, author of Bough Down and Siglio Press, her publisher, for winning the 2013 Believer Poetry Award! Karen Green's debut collection of poetry is a meditation on love and untimely death. Written after the death of her partner, the novelist, David Foster Wallace, Green's book is as gorgeous as it is bittersweet. We're glad to hear that Green's collection has been recognized for the 2013 Believer Poetry Award. We've covered the book's reception to some degree here and here. We look forward to reading more of Green's work. From The Believer:

Karen Green’s raw, elegant first book—a mixture of verse paragraphs, images of miniature mixed-media collages (Green is also a visual artist), and blank pages—is a moving portrait of love, marriage, the untimely death of a spouse, the poet’s ensuing grief, and the marriage that still, somehow, remains. One of the most intimate and effective extended elegies to be published in recent years (joining such notable works as Anne Carson’s Nox and Rebecca Lindenberg’s Love, an Index), Bough Down is also a brilliant case study in psycho-emotional realism: in this case, the way that psychological rupture affects the very experience of experience, and the role of language in finding one’s way back to normalcy… At all junctures, Green’s writing shows life exceeding expectations—exceeding sense—because it exceeds thought. Bough Down is a breathtaking achievement.

Three cheers!