"Betwixt and between, at the threshold, on the cusp — Jennifer Grotz fuses day and night, light and dark, past and present in a work that glows with a mysterious blue light and shines with an eerie brilliance." — Edward Hirsch
"In Cusp, Jennifer Grotz situates us perilously, vertiginously, at the now of ruin and abandon that we necessarily suffer from and inflict on others out of a belief that 'there is always something beyond' and a 'fear that one may never arrive.' Cusp marks the long-awaited arrival of an excitingly original new voice in contemporary poetry." — Carl Phillips
Entre le chien et le loup — between the dog and the wolf. This French colloquialism for twilight is the inspiration for this stunning debut collection of poems by Jennifer Grotz. Selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as the winner of the 2002 Bakeless Prize for Poetry, Cusp is an exploration of a particular middle ground — those moments, like dusk, that are between: between the past and the future, between domestic and foreign, and between the random and the inevitable.
Grotz inhabits with equal comfort the dusty plains of West Texas and the cobblestone streets of Europe. She takes us from a rodeo where a rugged rider holds tight to his bucking horse to a smoky Paris jazz club where horns wail Nina Simone's "Ne Me Quitte Pas."
In choosing this collection, Yusef Komunyakaa writes: "On the cusp of multiple borders, the speakers throughout this wonderful collection find the strength and integrity to cross borders in the flesh and mind — one half-hidden path leads to another, and before long, without any deception, a certain transcendence is earned through Grotz's vibrant language." This is truly a marvelous collection, heralding the arrival of wonderful new voice in American poetry.
The Katharine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prizes were established in 1996 to support new writers of literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. The winners are selected from a national competition sponsored by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Also available this year is Sara Pritchard's debut novel, Crackpots, selected by Ursula Hegi. Judges for the 2004 Bakeless Prizes are Robert Pinsky for poetry, Charles Baxter for fiction, and William Kittredge for creative nonfiction.
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