Ciara Totton has won the first annual Charles Poetry Award. Her book was selected from hundreds of submissions by a board of writers.
Here’s what Dennis Held said about the book:
Given the vivid attention to the telling detail and the sureness of the poetic voice, it is hard to believe that Bodies in Reduction is Ciara Totton’s first book. But her hand is sure as she navigates the landscape of a difficult life well-lived, making her way through a childhood marked by abuse and facing an angry god: marked perhaps, but not overwhelmed. The muscular strength of the line, the defiant tone, the clarity of vision become the tools of salvation in Totton’s remarkably resilient poems. In the end, Bodies in Reduction reveals a triumph of the spirit and is an antidote to despair with its fearless, open-eyed hope.
Dennis Held, author of Not Me Exactly