Description: Poetry. Winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize selected by David Wojahn. For philosopher Michel Foucault, "heterotopia" designates a real or imagined space of escape, transformation, or revelation. In Lesley Wheeler's prizewinning second collection, the heterotopia is Liverpool, England, during the middle of the twentieth century--a time and place defined by the Blitz and the privations that followed. Her imaginary Liverpool, however, has a complicated relationship to the real city and to her own life in the United States: it makes visible what was gained and lost in the transition from poverty to prosperity, from oral culture to print overload.
Brief description: Lesley Wheeler is the author of HETEROTOPIA, HEATHEN, Voicing American Poetry, and other books; she co-edited the anthology Letters to the World with Moira Richards and Rosemary Starace. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Slate, and Prairie Schooner. She is Professor of English at Washington and Lee University and lives in Lexington, Virginia. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholar senior research grant to conduct research at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, during the 2010-11 academic year.