Description: Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry
Dear Wallace addresses the poet and insurance executive Wallace Stevens in an attempt to reconsider art, power, and creativity amid the demands of everyday responsibility. Exploring relationships between modernism, motherhood, poetry, and privilege, the speaker of these poems puts her daily routines in dialogue with his. Curious, funny, and wry, Julie Choffel confronts Stevens as an unlikely peer who lived and wrote in the same city and weather as she does now, imagining a present-day conversation about the many ways creative practice is informed by social context. As we struggle to marry creative independence with our communal obligations, the questions in these poems are more urgent than ever. Stevens, a proxy for beauty, inventiveness, and legitimacy, becomes an audience for the ennui, anxiety, and politics of care that characterize another kind of writer's life today.Review Quotes: "Part homage, part rebuke, part domestic cri de coeur, Dear Wallace levels a nervy, philosophical critique at the myth of male genius and the American dream. Supreme fictions be damned. Here are notes toward a subversive, feminist reality."--Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book