Wyoming

Poetry. Winner of the 2014 Furniture Press Poetry Prize. "Iris Cushing's WYOMING is a figure of place, a topos: the West as acid trip, art-space, corny historical re-enactment, and land mass of brute and awesome beauty; locus of an almost erotic nostalgia for a dream- frontier that may never have existed, but nevertheless persists. When Cushing writes that, like the circle of stones around a campfire, 'we contain something / that spreads, ' consider how the mythos of the Wild West has magnified and ranged over time through the global imagination. In WYOMING, a prospector's pickaxe might eerily unearth 'an empty space in the shape of me / where Gloria Swanson used to be'; at the very least, wherever it strikes, it can't avoid deep veins of longing. Romantic, skeptical, haunting, these poems thrill me with their truth and inventiveness, their technical dexterity, the oscillations of body-mind-spirit rhythms, and their wagonloads of tarnished, glittering, and reduced-to-ashes props. Cushing's poems contain--ingeniously, dangerously, lovingly--such excesses of real gold and fool's gold at the heart of the American Sublime."--Miranda Field