ISSUE O.6/FALL 2019

2019 FOLIO POETRY PRIZE WINNER

It was my keen honor and pleasure to select Patricia Clark's poems for the Fourth River Folio contest. As a self-avowed "hater" of "nature poetry," it took a voice as persuasive and heightened as Patricia Clark's to make me drop my short-sighted preconceptions about what poems about the natural world can do. Clark's poems are lively and exact--sparse when they need to be, more voluble when the occasion demands. Her vision is painterly without being stodgy, and her poems make vivid word-portraits in the reader's mind without giving in to undue sentimentality. Her language is that of an artist--small strokes at times, but often those small detailed strokes add up to an entire world in a poem. This is a poet who loves language, and that love and inherent trust in what language can do makes me drop my inhibitions and immerse my self fully in her work.

2019 FOLIO POETRY PRIZE JUDGE: ALLISON JOSEPH

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In Praise of the Dickcissel and Other Poems
Folio Prize Winner 0.6
Patricia Clark
In Praise of the Dickcissel and Other Poems
Folio Prize Winner 0.6
Patricia Clark

Patricia Clark is the author of The Canopy (2017, Terrapin Books), her fifth book of poetry. She teaches in the Writing Department at Grand Valley State University where she is also the university's poet in residence. Find her recent work in Alaska Quarterly Review, Smartish Pace, New Letters, North American Review, and Blackbird. She was the poet laureate of Grand Rapids, MI from 2005-2007, and she has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland.

Folio Prize Winner 0.6
Patricia Clark