Grand Prize Honorable Mention

Eric Hoffer Awards

“Frannie Lindsay’s poems recall Tsvetayeva’s epistolary prose in which corporeality is freed from its external boundaries, embracing, instead, the transcendent where, as Tsvetayeva wrote, ‘a dream hand take/Another hand’s dream.’ The sleeper, Lindsay’s late husband, is guided back home: ‘do not be afraid/here is a harpsichord/here is a greyhound/here the first phrase of a cello sonata/and the slowed wind of your wife’s silver hair.’ The book extends beyond elegies to other hard-hitting evocations. In a prayer for her rapist, Lindsay offers ‘I hope he has learned/to slink unnoticed across the nights’ sad meadows, leaving the aster/alone in their clusters.’ God, Lindsay beckons, is both ‘beloved and exiled’ …‘we can/no longer awaken/even one star. The Snow’s Wife is a remarkable book of unbroken, emphasized silences, of enduring heart and intuition: ‘The snow, if it was kind, would fall again like old magnolia petals/loosening all at once because it’s time.’”

Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest

“Why, when Frannie Lindsay calls me to walk with her on the way of the cross, do I find myself saying yes, yes, thank you? Is it because her beautiful, pungent, sensual laments confirm that I'm not crazy, that the world is in fact as sad and full of grace as I thought? Is it because Lindsay has already written several fiercely lovely books of poems that are essential to me, such that now I will follow her voice absolutely anywhere? Yes, and yes, and thank you.” 

Patrick Donnelly, author of Little-Known Operas